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International audience ; This paper estimates the tariff equivalent of the border barrier in each bilateral trade among European Union countries. The results show that there are large differences in the border barrier across European Union countries' bilateral trade. In some bilateral trade flows the border barrier has almost disappeared, whereas in other cases it is still equivalent to a 75 per cent tariff. The results also show that some countries have low border barriers in most of their bilateral trade flows with other EU members, whereas other countries persistently present large border barriers.

Desde Adam Smith, los economistas han reconocido la importancia de la protección de los derechos de propiedad, el cumplimiento de los contratos, la estabilidad política y la ausencia de corrupción para que una economía pueda prosperar. Sin embargo, no es hasta fechas muy recientes cuando los investigadores han tratado de estimar en qué medida las instituciones explican las diferencias de renta per cápita entre países. El artículo presenta los avances que han sido necesarios para poder realizar dichas estimaciones y repasa las conclusiones de los estudios empíricos sobre la relación entre la calidad institucional y la renta per capita.__________________________________________________________________________Since Adam Smith, economists have stressed the role of the protection of property rights, the enforcement of contracts, political stability and the lack of corruption in economic growth. Nevertheless, until recently, scholars were not able to estimate to what extent institutions could explain the differences in per capita income among countries. This article presents the breakthroughs needed to allow these estimations, and it surveys the conclusions of the empirical studies that have analysed the contribution of institutional quality on economic growth.

The existence of a large border effect is considered as one of the main puzzles of international macroeconomics. We show that the border effect is, to a large extent, an artefact of geographical concentration. To do so, we combine international flows with intra-national flows data characterised by a high geographical grid. At this fine grid, intra-national flows are highly localised and dropping sharply with distance. The use of a small geographical unit of reference to measure intra-national bilateral trade flows allows to estimating correctly the negative impact of distance on shipments. When we use sector disaggregated export flows of 50 Spanish provinces in years 2000 and 2005 split into inter-provincial and inter-national flows, we find that the border effect is reduced substantially and even becomes statistically not different from zero in some estimations. ; Financial support from Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (ECO2010-21643/ECON; project ECO 2008-04059/ECON), Regional Government of Madrid (project TransporTrade S2007/HUM/497), Department of Education, Universities and Research of the Basque Government, and Generalitat Valenciana (project Prometeo/2009/098).