October 2008

Andrzej Cieślik

Bio

Andrzej Cieślik, a visiting associate professor at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame, has held scholarships and fellowships at the Institute for Central and East European Studies at Catholic University of Louvain, the Polish Studies Center and Department of Economics at Indiana University, the Central and East European Economic Research Center in Warsaw, the Department of Economics at Columbia University, and the Department of Economics at the University of Glasgow. He has written numerous articles, book reviews, and book chapters, as well as award-winning books, including: The Geography of Foreign Investment: The Reasons for and the Consequences of Location of the Firms with Foreign Capital Participation in Poland, A Guide to Problems in Macroeconomics, and The New Trade Theory in the Light of Empirical Evidence (published in Warsaw, titles translated to English). Cieślik holds an MA in Economics from the Catholic University of Louvain and a PhD in Economics from Warsaw University.

Abstract

The EU, the US, and the MENA Countries: Prospects and Consequences of Trade LiberalizationThe EU-sponsored Barcelona conference in 1995 set the ambitious goal of creating the Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Area (EUROMED), which would include the European Union and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries by the year 2010. The intermediate steps towards building the EUROMED have involved bilateral “vertical” trade liberalization between the EU and particular MENA countries as well as “horizontal” trade liberalization among themselves. In this study we evaluate empirically the effects of the EU-sponsored trade liberalization in the MENA countries during the period of 1980–2004 using the augmented gravity equations derived from neoclassical and new trade theory models. We find that while the new EU Association Agreements significantly increased MENA country imports from the EU, they had no impact on their exports to the EU, which can be attributed to the asymmetry in trade liberalization between the EU and the MENA countries. Moreover, the conclusion of the EUROMED Association Agreements stimulated trade liberalization between the US and MENA countries.