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This paper discusses the role of agritourism in deprived rural areas as an instrument of regional development that builds on local cultural and natural advantages. This is illustrated with preliminary data collected from interviews carried out at agritourism enterprises from the demarcated wine-producing regions of the north of Portugal. The evidence gathered shows that tourism may have a role in marketing unique local products, preserving architectural heritage and developing physical and human capital in which rural regions are lacking. Moreover, the LEADER capital provided by the European Union was a crucial factor in the interviewees' initial investment decisions.

This paper uses a gravity model to forecast the potential impact on trade balances and trade patterns of the 2004 EU enlargement. The results suggest that gross trade creation for the accession economies is about 25 per cent of their 2003 trade. Although membership of the EU creates trade it also results in trade diversion; that is, a declining share of accession country exports and imports with non-EU15 countries. Overall, the trade balances of the accession countries suffer larger trade deficits after accession due to import growth surpassing export growth. The extent of increase in the trade deficit due to accession is inversely related to the level of integration and income of the new members. Hence integration is path-dependent and the EU should take this into account when preparing for further enlargements to the Balkans and Southeast Europe. Copyright 2006 The Authors Journal compilation 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. .

This paper examines the extent of passthrough of exchange rate and tariff changes into import prices using sectoral panel data (at the two‐digit SITC level) for the post‐reform period in India (1990–2001). After having controlled for unobserved effects that might have an impact on the import prices by using sector dummies, we find that on average exchange rate passthrough (ERPT) is a dominant effect compared to tariff rate passthrough (TRPT) in explaining changes in India's import prices. The sectoral panel results suggest that the passthrough of exchange rates and tariff rates varies across products. ERPT into import prices is significant in 12 industries, whereas TRPT is significant only in six industries, with full passthrough. However, ERPT is incomplete only in four industries, but TRPT is incomplete in 36 industries, which means that firms exporting to India more frequently adopt strategies to maintain their market share against tariffs than against exchange rate changes. The sectoral differences in passthrough seem to be related to the sector's share in total imports and the sector's effective protection rate. Hence, India's relatively high levels of protection have an impact on the behavior of foreign exporters.

In this paper, we develop a new version of a theory-based gravity equation to properly account for the relative price indices initially proposed by Anderson and van Wincoop (2003). The partially time-varying character of our multilateral resistance variables overcomes the bias present in earlier studies that solely rely on country or country pair fixed effects. Applying the augmented gravity equation to the process of European Union (EU) integration during the 1990s, we find robust evidence that the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) have substantially increased intra-group trade, in the case of the Czech and Slovak Republic and Slovenia at the expense of the Rest of the World (ROW). Since decreasing multilateral trade resistance negatively influences a country's bilateral imports but may be positively correlated with a bilateral FTA, earlier East-West studies, which ignored the relative price term's time-varying character, tend to be downward biased. Indeed, our results indicate that once we correct for the omitted variable bias, the FTAs with the CEECs created 7 to 20% more new trade compared with the scenario where only time-invariant country pair effects were included.free trade agreements, gravity equation, Central and Eastern Europe, panel data,