Samuel Standaert

Measuring Actual Economic Integration: A Bayesian State-Space Approach

The authors construct an indicator of regional integration based on a Bayesian state-space approach. The state-space model is helpful in estimating the overall level of regional integration by using all information contained in a set of indicators. The authors apply this model to the level of regional integration between members of the OECD. The variables of the level of regional integration – i.e. the Current Economic Integration (AEI) (Mongelli FP, Dorrucci E, Agur I, What does European institutional integration tell us about trade integration. European Central Bank Occasional Paper Series 40, 2005) – are standardized and organized in four groups: flows of goods, flows of services, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and other financial flows, and migration. The AEI can also be used to construct a weighted directed network. By observing the weighted directed network, the authors found that the core players in the OECD are the US, Germany and the United Kingdom, and in second place, France, Italy and Japan. Finally, they conclude that the level of economic integration among OECD members has increased over the last 20 years, and that the European integration agreements and the NAFTA have had positive effects on economic integration.

Combining growth and level data : an estimation of the population of Belgian municipalities between 1880 and 1970

ABSTRACT Economic historians that study long-term changes during the nineteenth and twentieth century are fundamentally restricted by the availability of qualitative data. As a result, researchers are forced to either impute missing data, or otherwise combine datasets in some way. In this article, we demonstrate the versatility of state-space models in addressing these problems. Not only do they enable us to compose large data series of high quality, they also provide a clear estimate of how reliable this data is, allowing any subsequent analyses to take this reliability into account. We illustrate the advantages of a state-space model using the population of Belgian municipalities as a case study. By combining growth and level data, we are able to compute yearly population statistics of over 2600 municipalities from 1880 to 1970.

Structure and evolution of the world's historical trade patterns

International trade has been an important driver for the development of our modern world, but capturing trade patterns and their change over time continues to prove a daunting task. Painting a detailed picture of historical trade patterns not only puts a high demand on the availability and quality of data, it also begs for an intuitive and succinct way to describe the resulting patterns. To uncover the overall patterns in the data we adopt the complex network perspective. After constructing the historical trade integration network, we use temporal stochastic block models to extract the meso-scale network structure. This SBM methodology makes full use of all available data, takes the time dimension into account and does not make a priori assumptions about the structure of the network.

Rent Seeking and Regional Integration Agreements Preliminary draft

This paper explores the motives behind the formation of intra-African regional integration agreements (RIAs). The traditional advantages of economic integration, the static and dynamic effects, predict no, or even a negative effect on welfare. Moreover, many of the new regionalism theories are conditional on strong economic integration. Rent-seeking behavior and the regime boosting hypothesis are two exceptions. Not only can they credibly explain the proliferation of African trade agreements in the absence of a positive effect on welfare, they can also explain the lack of progress in clearing away the many obstructions to regional trade. The aim of this paper is to see whether rent-seeking can be identified as a statistically significant driving force of African integration. The determinants of integration are usually estimated in a bilateral framework, focussing on existence of an agreement between pairs of countries. However, this method is prone to a missing variable bias when used in the context of African integration, because most agreements involve more than two partner countries. As an alternative, we propose looking at country-RIA pairs, or in other words, studying the determinants of a country’s decision to join a certain agreement. However, in spite of the anecdotal evidence, we cannot find any evidence that rent-seeking behavior has been a motive for African integration. Corruption is insignificant, regardless of the way of testing, or the corruption indicator used. The factors that seem to explain African integration are all geographical, not economic nor political.