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One of the pillars of the 1957 Treaty of Rome that ultimately led to the European Union is the commitment to the four freedoms of movement (goods, services, persons, and capital). Over the following decades, as the members expanded in numbers, they also sought to deepen the integration amongst themselves in all four dimensions. This paper estimates the success of these policies based primarily on a gravity framework. Distinct from past evaluations, we augment the traditional equation for international flows with the corresponding intra-national flows, permitting us to distinguish welfare-improving reductions in frictions from Fortress-Europe effects. We complement the gravity approach by measuring the extent of price convergence. We compare both quantity and price assessments of free movement with corresponding estimates for the 50 American states.

The European single market in electricity has been promoted vigorously by the European Commission since 1996. We discuss how national electricity markets and cross-border electricity markets have been reshaped by the process. We examine the Commission’s own work on evaluating the benefits of the single market. We look at the wider evidence of impact on prices, security of supply, the environment, and innovation. We conclude that the institutional changes are extensive and there has been significant market harmonisation and integration. However, the measured benefits are difficult to identify, but likely to be small. This is partly because over the same period there has been a large rise in subsidised renewable generation that is driven by the decarbonisation agenda.

A thorough investigation of the relationship between the deepening and the widening processes of EU integration and the historic evolution of regional disparities is missing in the related vast existing inductive literature. This usually focuses on EU15 countries or Central and Eastern European Countries, generally involves relatively short and recent periods, and takes into consideration just one institutional change at a time, if any. This article aims at filling these gaps by providing a theoretical interpretative framework on the effects of each institutional change on inter- and intranational disparities, and by verifying the fitness of the theoretical expectations with a longitudinal trend analysis and with an econometric event analysis. Theory was overall right in claiming that widening and deepening of the EU would have exacerbated intraregional disparities. Counteracting such tendency could look like fighting gravity, since disparities continuously reappear in different forms and spatial levels, transmitting a sense of unescapable normality.

This paper estimates the consumer welfare impact of the new generation of trade agreements implemented by the European Union between 1993 and 2013. We decompose the overall effect into contributions of changes in prices, quality and variety. Estimating trade elasticities for narrow product categories of EU imports, we infer quality from data on imported values and volumes. For the EU as a whole, we find that trade agreements increased quality by 7% on average but did not affect prices or variety. This translates into a cumulative reduction in the consumer price index of 0.24% over our sample period. We also find a high degree of impact heterogeneity across EU countries, trading partners, and the type of trade agreement, with high-income EU countries seeing much stronger quality increases and larger overall consumer benefits.

E-commerce possesses considerable potential for developing the internationalisation and integration of consumer markets by bringing sellers and consumers from different countries directly into contact with each other without the requirement for intermediaries. However, cross-border online purchases remain low compared to domestic online purchases. Large differences between individual countries are also observed in the percentage of consumers who purchase cross-border. While previous studies of e-commerce have concentrated on the decision to buy on-line, this study concentrates on the decision to purchase cross-border compared to purchasing on-line only domestically. To this end, a statistical qualitative response model is developed and tested against a large data set of consumers living in the thirty countries belonging to the European Economic Area. The results demonstrate the importance of country level determinants in addition to the personal characteristics of the consumer in terms of their age, gender, profession, educational background, location and trust in non-domestic suppliers in the decision to purchase cross-border. Among the country level determinants, domestic market size, economic development and ethnic fractionalization of the country are all shown to play an important role. The results have important practical implications for e-commerce sellers as well as public authorities. The country-specific socio-economic determinants can help to better assess the potential market for cross-border selling and guide public policies aimed at stimulating cross-border selling as a means to integrate consumer markets in the European Economic Area.

Die Europäische Union (EU) will außenpolitisch souverän werden. Um sich gegen wirtschaftlichen Zwang aus den USA aber auch aus China zu wehren, hat sie sich vor einigen Jahren neue Handelsinstrumente geschaffen. Bisher betont die EU, ihre Instrumente nur im Einklang mit internationalen Handelsregeln einsetzen zu wollen. Aber eine schnelle und effektive Abwehr von wirtschaftlichem Zwang dürfte kaum mit WTO-Regeln vereinbar sein. Wenn es der EU gelingt, mögliche Regelüberschreitungen klar zu begründen und andere Länder in ihre Entscheidungen miteinzubeziehen, könnte sie hingegen den Reputationsschaden mindern. Sie braucht dazu eine neue Wirtschaftsdiplomatie.

International security debates surrounding the European Union (EU) energy supply challenge commonly invoke the need for more EU hard power - e.g. getting tough on Russia or engaging directly with other exporters. This article investigates whether what might be labelled 'soft power with a hard edge' instead amounts to a consistent policy strategy for the EU. The central argument is that the EU has turned a weakness into strength, and developed a set of tools that sharpen the way soft power is exercised in the energy sector. The article explores how soft power affects companies that 'come and play' on the EU market: the rules of the Single European Market (SEM) and how they affect external firms. It also assesses the long reach of the SEM: both the gravitational 'pull' the SEM exerts in the 'near aboard', and the EU's 'push' to facilitate the development of midstream infrastructure and upstream investment. The conclusion is that the EU regulatory state is emerging as an international energy actor in its own right. It limits the ways states like Russia can use state firms in the geopolitical game; and it exports its model into the near abroad, thus stabilizing energy supply and transit routes.

We examine the impact of formal standards on trade in global value chains (GVCs) in Europe. Using a gravity model approach for panel data, we estimate the influence of national, European and international standards on trade in value-added and gross trade flows within Europe. We find that national standards on their own hamper trade in European value chains while European and international standards foster trade. European standards have greater influence on trade in inner-European value chains whereas international standards have positive effects on imports into Europe from third countries. European standards therefore reduce information asymmetries between market actors in the value chains of the European Single Market. International standards serve as a means of global communication between international trade partners. In addition, we find a positive effect of an interaction term between national and European standards in European value chains confirming the necessity of national standardization. Furthermore, we consider our findings not only within international political economy's theoretical literature regarding the governance of GVCs but also, the subsequent policy implications of our findings in terms of economic growth and development.

The European Single Market created a common market for millions of Europeans. However, 30 years after its introduction, it appears that the benefits of the common European project are occasionally being questioned at least by some parts of the population. Others, by contrast, strive for deeper integration. Against this background, we empirically gauge the growth effect that arose from the Single Market. Using the synthetic control method, we establish the growth premium for the Single Market overall and for its founding members. Broadly in line with the predictions made by Richard Baldwin at the onset of the Single Market project, we find significantly higher real GDP per capita for the overall Single Market area of around 12–22 %. In comparison, smaller EU Member States seem to have benefited somewhat more compared to larger countries. The estimated growth effects underline the case for further deepening and broadening the Single Market where possible.