This Policy Briefing examines how Europe’s corporations are changing the way they do business since the 2004 EU Enlargement. Dalia Marin argues that firms are adapting to heightening global competition by shifting decision-making processes. The author gives policy recommendations in the areas...

Countertrade consists of bilateral agreements (usually) between Western industrial enterprises and government agencies or state-owned enterprises in developing countries (LDCs) and centrally planned economies (CPEs), whereby sales of goods by the western exporter are linked contractually to the...

Starting with the international debt crisis in the 1980s, international barter increased substantially. More recently, barter has emerged in Russia and South East Asia. This paper examines how barter can help highly indebted countries to finance imports if they cannot use standard credit...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of countertrade based on 230 transactions whose details were collected from trading houses and firms involved in countertrade. Section 2 describes the data base and states the stylised facts of countertrade that need to be explained. Section 3 gives a...

We incorporate trade in tasks à la Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) into a small open economy version of the theory of firm organization of Marin and Verdier (2012) to examine how offshoring affects the way firms organize. We show that the offshoring of production tasks leads firms to...

What insights can be gained from bringing the theory of the firm to the global economy? I discuss several new features of the world economy that can be explained by incorporating the theory of the firm into the theory of international trade. Among the new features I discuss are the move to...

Feenstra and Hanson (1997) have argued in the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement that US outsourcing to Mexico leads to an increase in the skill premium in both the US and Mexico. In this paper we show on the example of Austria and Poland that with the new international division...

Europe is reorganizing its international value chain. I document these changes in Europe’s international organization of production with new survey data of Austrian and German firms investing in Eastern Europe. I show estimates of the share of intrafirm trade between Austria or Germany on...

This paper provides a unified analysis for the onset of the 1998 financial crisis and the strong economic recovery afterward in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries. Before the crisis a banking failure arose owing to the coexistence of a lemons credit market and high government...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004Globalization has been identified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities and as the emergence of talent as the new stakeholder in the firm. This paper examines the role of trade integration for the...