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This article investigates the location determinants of firms with foreign capital participation within Poland using the regional data set from 1993 to 1998. It is found that the concentration of foreign economic activity is positively related to industry and service agglomeration and the road network and negatively to the unemployment rate. Traditional regional characteristics such as GDP, wage rate and education, often regarded as important location determinants, are not robust with respect to the specification of the estimating equation. The special economic zone variable is not found to be statistically significant in any specification estimated. Geographic location dummies confirm that foreign firms prefer Central and South-Western regions over Eastern parts of Poland having controlled for their characteristics.

This paper investigates the importance of border effects for the location of foreign firms within Poland using a regional data set for the 1990s. In contrast to previous studies the border effects are estimated for individual neighbouring countries that belong to two groups: EU member countries and EU non-accessing countries. It is shown that border dummies for three EU non-accessing countries: Belarus, Russia and Ukraine are negative and statistically significant. These results suggest that regions located along the Polish segment of the Eastern frontier of the enlarged European Union are less attractive to foreign investors compared to other Polish regions, having controlled for their economic and social characteristics. This finding has important implications for the conduct of regional policy as public aid or special economic status may be necessary for these disadvantaged regions to prevent uneven regional growth and widening of development disparities within Poland. Copyright (c) 2005 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.

The EU-sponsored Barcelona conference in 1995 set the ambitious goal of creating the Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Area (EUROMED) that would include the European Union and the MENA countries by 2010. The intermediate steps towards building the EUROMED have involved bilateral "vertical" trade liberalization between the EU and the particular MENA countries as well as "horizontal" trade liberalization among themselves. In this paper we evaluate empirically the effects of the new EU Association Agreements with the MENA countries using the augmented gravity equations derived from a variety of neoclassical and new trade theory models and panel data for the period 1980-2004. We find that while these agreements increased significantly imports of the MENA countries from the EU they had no positive impact on their exports to the EU which can be attributed to the asymmetry in trade liberalization between the EU and the MENA countries.

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