Suchergebnisse

The close relationship between politics and enterprises made the revolving door wide open and reinforced business influence on political decisions. The paper analyses relationship between firm entry institutions and import competition inside the EU. Though there is a clear tendency for entry and startup costs to decrease over time and particularly in space, I challenge the view that greater openness to trade automatically leads to improved firm entry institutions. My model enables calculating business entry impediments whereas lobbying game produces structural estimates of the counterfactual levels of trade, prices and earnings had no business obstacles existed. Conditions for active entry barriers are laid down in terms of extensive margin and asymmetries in technology and trade costs. Importantly, the model demonstrates that startling differences in firm regulation can be explained resorting to relative gains and losses accruing in a fully trading network as is the EU. More generally, understanding factors which affect imports is crucial for any model seeking to uncover ex ante welfare effects of trade.

In this paper we examine plausible macroeconomic responses to the ex ante (planned but not implemented yet) reforms in the labor market, taking a currently proposed Social Model in Lithuania as an example. We contribute not only to the current debate on the efficacy of announced structural reforms, but also to the literature on policy evaluation, by assessing reforms from a global perspective. Taking trade linkages and openness into account, we demonstrate macroeconomic reactions to shocks in unemployment benefits, active labor market policies, and tax wedge on the reforming economy. In particular, we show that the omission of an international dimension could lead to seriously biased results on policy effects for any open and small economy. Using a satellite model for the intermediate trade, we link the global framework with the sectoral extensive margin, which changes some of the results derived from the aggregate data. (JELC33, C54, E62, J38)