Trade and migration flows between some CEE countries and the UK

Abstract

The recent enlargement of the European Union [EU] has enhanced interest in the causes and consequences of migration between Central and Eastern European [CEE] and Western European countries. This paper considers immigration from CEE countries into the UK and the consequences for these countries" trade with the UK. Using a panel of data covering selected CEE countries between 1996 and 2003, we employ an augmented gravity model to examine the effects of immigration from these transition countries on trade flows with the UK. We pay attention to a number of issues that have been raised within the literature on gravity models. We find evidence that migration positively enhances the bi-lateral exports of the migrants" home country; there is less (but some) evidence that the imports from their destination country are also enhanced.

European economic integration and migration in Romania

“…The smaller the distance between the origin country and the destination country, the greater the impact of migration on trade is. Ghatak, Silaghi, and Daly (2009) showed, based on an extended gravity model, that between 1996 and 2003, the UK immigrants from some CEE countries had a positive and significant impact on trade flows with the destination country. According to the IMF Commercial Division, the share of trade made by CEE states in total EU trade exceeds 50%.…”

“…According to the IMF Commercial Division, the share of trade made by CEE states in total EU trade exceeds 50%. According to Ghatak et al (2009), if we analyse countries according to the average share of trade with the United Kingdom versus total trade with the rest of the EU, we have the following top countries: Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia.…”

Bridging Trade Theory and Labour Econometrics: The Effects of International Migration*

“…23 Building on Gould's original work, a sizable literature of gravity-based estimates of the effect of migration on trade has developed. The single most studied reference country is the US (Dunlevy and Hutchinson, 1999;Hutchinson and Dunlevy, 2001;Co et al, 2004;Herander and Saavedra, 2005;Mundra, 2005;Dunlevy, 2006;Millimet and Osang, 2007;Bandyopadhyay et al, 2008;White, 2008, 2010;White, 2007bWhite, , 2009Tadesse, 2008a, 2008b;Jansen and Piermartini, 2009); however, there are also analyses featuring Canada (Helliwell, 1997;Head and Ries, 1998;Ching and Chen, 2000;Wagner et al, 2002;Jiang, 2007;Partridge and Furtan, 2008); the UK (Girma and Yu, 2002;Ghatak et al, 2009); Switzerland (Kandogan, 2009;Tai, 2009); Germany (Bruder, 2004); Denmark (White, 2007a); France (Briant et al, 2009);Spain (Blanes-Cristóbal, 2004; Greece (Piperakis et al, 2003); Italy (Murat and Pistoresi, 2009); the EU 15 (Parsons, 2005); Australia (White and Tadesse, 2007); New Zealand (Bryant et al, 2004) and Malaysia (Hong and Santhapparaj, 2006). 24 Very broadly, and with very few exceptions, these papers consistently find significant positive effects of immigration on trade -whether measured as imports or exports.…”

The economics of the Fifth Enlargement: Trade, migration and economic synchronicity

“…This finding has tremendous analytical and policy implications that we hope future studies on the topic will explore further. Ghatak et al (2009), in the third paper in this special issue, look at a more empirical question, but one of equal importance for both policy and academic enquiry. Their paper is concerned with the role that the presence of migrants plays for the determination of the bilateral volume of trade between the migrants' host and home countries.…”