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Borders within Europe

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Are country borders still an impediment to trade flows within Europe? Using a microlevel survey with 3 million annual shipments of goods, we construct a matrix of bilateral trade for 269 European regions. Take two similar region pairs, one containing regions in different countries and the other containing regions in the same country. The market share of the origin region in the destination region for the international pair is 17.5 percent that of the intranational pair. Across industries, this estimate ranges from 12.3 to 38.9 percent. For post-1910 borders, this estimate is 28.8 percent. The implication is clear: Europe is far from having a single market.

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  • Marta Santamaría & Jaume Ventura & Uğur Yeşilbayraktar, 2020. "Borders within Europe," Economics Working Papers 1763, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Feb 2024.
    • Handle: RePEc:upf:upfgen:1763
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Border effect; European integration; regional trade;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
    • F15 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Economic Integration
    • F55 - International Economics - - International Relations, National Security, and International Political Economy - - - International Institutional Arrangements
    • H77 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - Intergovernmental Relations; Federalism
    • O57 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Comparative Studies of Countries

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