While trade liberalization has always been the core of common policies, only in very recent years Europe has started to address the challenge of migration in a comprehensive way. Conventional wisdom considers potential gains from liberalizing trade much higher for European countries than the benefits deriving from liberalization of migration. This paper gives evidence of the benefits European host countries had from immigration, identifying trade channel as the key driver of these benefits. It focuses on 17 European Union member states and 10 extra-European partners with the highest immigration flows towards the EU-27. The period considered is the decade 1997-2006. Controlling for endogeneity, the results I obtain suggest that migration have a statistically significant and robust enhancing effect on European countries exports, this effect being particularly important when considering differentiated commodities rather than homogeneous goods. This confirms the importance of the “network effect” of migration for European countries. Evidence on imports, instead, is puzzled. To my knowledge this is the first attempt in the literature to test the trade enhancing effect of migration using a panel, including a consistent number of European Countries and extra-European partner quite different in terms of geographical location, socio-economics and cultural characteristics and inspecting such recent years. This further extends existing evidence on the network effect and allows considering the results valid in a cross-country analysis over time.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by ISLA, Centre for research on Latin American Studies and Transition Economies, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy in its series ISLA Working Papers with number
35.
Length: 33 pages Date of creation: Oct 2009 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:slp:islawp:islawp35
Contact details of provider: Postal: via Sarfatti, 25 - 20136 Milano - Italy Phone: +39.025836.2296 Fax: +39.025836.5439 Web page: http://www.isla.unibocconi.it/
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Stefano Riela).
Find related papers by JEL classification: F15 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Economic Integration F22 - International Economics - - International Factor Movements and International Business - - - International Migration
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports: