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The importance of fixed export costs
Posted by on 16 September 2010
In a recent Vox column, Lucian Cernat – Chief Trade Economist of the European Commission – called on his colleagues to contribute to a public debate on the direction of the EU’s future trade policy (Cernat, 2010). One of the questions he addresses concerns policy’s ability to address “beyond-tariff” trade barriers. Because traditional trade policies have already achieved major progress in the past decades, the relative importance of these non-tariff barriers has increased substantially. As these barriers are intimately related to a country’s institutions, not only does lowering them require a long-term perspective, they might also pose limits to what trade policies can ultimately achieve.