Regional Single Currency Effects on Bilateral Trade with the European Union

The regional effects of sharing a single currency on bilateral trade with other European Union member states are a contentious question. This paper examines the regional effects on trade of the set up of the euro as a common currency. It takes advantage of a gravity specification of bilateral trade between the seventeen Spanish regions and EU-13 countries over the period 1997-2004 and accounts for two distinct effects depending on the temporal set up of the euro. That is, the exchange rate volatility effect (from exchange rate fixing of national currencies in 1999) is distinguished from the so-called common currency effect (resulting from the issuing of a new currency in 2002). Findings are suggestive of a regional concentration of currency union effects in a few regions, namely those relatively more open to trade, though such effects are found to fade away over time. Trade expansion for the set up of the euro ranges between 45 to 16% depending on the specification, but only the exchange rate volatility effect of a common currency was found significant, pure currency union effects were instead found to be almost negligible.