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Against the backdrop of the lingering Ukraine crisis, Russia retaliated against the EU sanctions imposed on selected Russian enterprises and representatives by boycotting import goods from European and North American suppliers. Russian politicians further threatened to restrict the export of raw materials, especially natural gas, provided that the EU-Russia relations further worsen and sanctions gather momen-tum. Hence, the paper deals with the question to what extent the EU economies Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are vulnerable to Russian reprisals and would experience comparatively high costs of the EU sanction policy. The focus of the analysis is on the Baltic States’ trade relations with Russia because these countries were integrated in the Soviet division of labor before regaining independence. It is analyzed whether path dependencies in Baltic trade patterns still exist that could make Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania more vulnerable to political blackmail than other EU countries., Estonian Discussions on Economic Policy, Vol 23, No 1 (2015): Developments in global economy wrought with tensions. Entwicklungen in der angespannten Weltwirtschaftslage

In this paper, we propose a new approach to represent a country's outward orientation. Prior work mostly uses indicators of aggregate trade intensity, trade policy or trade restrictiveness. Our approach offers a broader perspective as it measures a country's level of integration not only by its set of direct trade connections with the rest of the world but also through the full architecture of its second, third, and all other higher-order connections. We apply our methodology to a sample of 167 countries spanning the period from 1962 to 2009 and perform a Bayesian modelaveraging analysis on the determinants of growth. We find a prominent positive effect of integration on a country's level of per capita income, while the aforementioned traditional measures of outward orientation display only a secondary, largely insignificant, weight. This, we argue, highlights the network basis of economic growth and adds a novel perspective to the notion of economic openness. We also perform several sensitivity checks and conclude that our baseline findings are extremely robust to different data input and alternative assumptions about the computation of country integration.

Die Regionalpolitik der Europäischen Union fördert die Entwicklung der wirtschaftlich am stärksten benachteiligten Regionen auf vielfältige Art und Weise und unterscheidet sich dabei kaum von den Regionalpolitiken der Mitgliedstaaten. In der Arbeit wird vorgeschlagen, der Regionalpolitik der EU einen originär europäischen Fokus zu geben und sie als Instrument zur Förderung der regionalen Dimension des Binnenmarktes zu etablieren. Das Thema wird aus einer europarechtlichen, wirtschaftstheoretischen und empirischen Perspektive beleuchtet. Im Zentrum der Arbeit steht die Frage, wie sich eine regionale Integration des Binnenmarktes auf den wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Zusammenhalt in der EU auswirkt. Die juristische Analyse zeigt, dass das Europarecht ausreichend Flexibilität für eine Neuausrichtung der Regionalpolitik bietet. Anhand ausgewählter Modelle der Neuen Ökonomischen Geographie wird eine verstärkte Integration der regionalen Gütermärkte mit Hilfe der Regionalpolitik der EU befürwortet, auch wenn eine vorübergehende Vergrößerung regionaler Disparitäten in Kauf genommen werden muss. Auf der Grundlage einzelner wirtschaftstheoretischer Modelle und empirischer Daten zum Integrationsstand europäischer Regionen werden Empfehlungen für die Gestaltung einer auf das Binnenmarktziel ausgerichteten Regionalpolitik formuliert. Die neusten Regelungen des Reformvertrags von Lissabon werden bereits berücksichtigt., The European Union regional policy fosters the economic development of the least favoured regions in various ways, most of them similar to the regional policies of the Member States. Therefore a new, but very European direction of the regional policy is proposed: the strengthening of the regional dimension of the European internal market. The topic is discussed from a legal and economical perspective. The central question of the thesis is whether and in which ways a regional integration of the internal market affects the economic and social cohesion in the EU. The legal analysis demonstrates that the European Union law provides sufficient flexibility for new impulses in regional policy. Based on selected models of the New Economic Geography, a new regional policy fostering the integration of the internal market for goods is supported, despite temporary regional disparities as accompanying symptoms. Using several theoretical models and empirical data on the level of integration of the European regions, the thesis concludes in with recommendations to design an EU regional policy directed towards the integration of the internal market. The thesis already incorporates the new regulation of the Treaty of Lisbon.