Damares Lopes Afonso (p), Fernando Perobelli , Weslem Faria, Erasmus zu Ermgassen

Lucía Bolea

The Brazilian biomes not only provide essential environmental services on a global scale but also contribute to income generation in the country through activities related to agribusiness. Given their social and ecological importance, we analyze the vegetation loss caused by agricultural activities and embodied in Brazil's intra- and inter- national trade, considering all Brazilian biomes and all types of vegetation (forest and other types). The results highlight the impacts of trade on vegetation loss in Brazilian biomes beyond the Amazônia, where other biomes emerge as critical hotspots. Protein-rich food sectors show high concentrations of vegetation loss in intra- and inter- national trade. These results represent the first comprehensive analysis of vegetation loss caused by agriculture and embodied in all the country's biomes, offering policymakers valuable insights.

Lucía Bolea (p), Rosa Duarte , Geoffrey J.D. Hewings, Sofía Jiménez

Jose Victor De Jesus Pereira Borges

Since the last decades of the XX century, countries worldwide become increasingly interdependent. This new era of globalization has been characterized by an increasing fragmentation of production and the irruption of the so-called Global Value Chains (GVCs). In this context, the behavior of economies advancing at different speeds is highly related to the concepts of economic convergence and catch up. One of the clearest examples of the convergence process is the European Union. At the regional level, the goal of regional convergence has been declared and committed to in the EU Treaties. However, the level of inequality between regions remains high, and different international institutions have claimed on the effects of these raising income differences in the observed dissatisfaction level within specific geographical areas and social groups, threatening social cohesion. GVCs have been, commonly, studied at country level. Nevertheless, recent literature has also paid attention to their regional scale, existing literature shows that regional economic specialization affects the economic performance of regions.
Within this framework, the main objective is to analyze to what extent the configuration of GVCs in Europe, and the way in which the regions have engaged in them, has contributed to the processes of economic and technological catch-up in Europe. In this context, some works claim the necessity of incorporating the potential spillovers among regions to capture a more informative picture of regional economies. Thus, we also aim to check the importance of neighboring regions, both geographically and economically, in explaining these processes. From an empirical standpoint, we combine multirregional input-output framework, for the design of the main indicators of regional engagement in the GVCs, with a spatial econometrics’ strategy, which is used to evaluate the main relationships, and to identify the main drivers and regional spillovers. Notably, we take advantage of the recently published FIGARO-REG database, which contains information on 240 NUTS2 EU regions for the year 2017, and EUROSTAT Regional Statistics as main databases. It should be noted that we consider not only the catch up of regions within the whole of Europe, but also with the closer countries and within the country, what let us understand the different development paths. First results reveal the existence of spatial dependence, and a positive and significant relation between participation and catch-up, while there is more uncertainty in relation to position.

Jose Victor De Jesus Pereira Borges (p)

Petros Milionis

This research seeks to identify the key deforestation-intensive products and commodities, map their countries of origin, and analyze their movement through global value chains. By doing so, it seeks to estimate the potential impacts of trade restrictions on deforestation-linked products, both in international trade and in global deforestation rates. The study will simulate the effects of the EUDR through hypothetical scenarios, with a particular focus on countries with extensive rainforest coverage. This ex-ante analysis will assess the potential outcomes if the EUDR had been in force since 2005, providing insights into its long-term implications for trade and deforestation dynamics

Petros Milionis (p)

Damares Lopes Afonso

We use a theory-consistent empirical gravity framework to compare the effect of Eurozone membership on trade flows relative to that of participating in the European common market as well as other EU and non-EU bilateral and multilateral trade arrangements or institutions. We conduct this analysis based on different bilateral trade data sets which capture both gross and value-added trade at different levels of aggregation. The data allow us to compare these effects across pairs of countries, economic sectors and sub-national regions at the NUTS-2 level. Overall we find that participation in the European common market has a large positive effect on bilateral trade flows while participation in the European monetary union leads typically to weak and statistically insignificant effects. At the same time we document substantial heterogeneity in these effects across sectors and regions. Across sectors we find the effects of the common market and the common currency to be larger for trade in manufacturing goods. Across regions we find both effects to be larger for regions that are geographically close and regions that share a common language. Exploiting further the timeline of EU integration, we demonstrate that the two effects increase in magnitude the longer a given pair has been part of both the common market and the common currency. The findings suggest that European trade integration is gradual and it builds on pre-existing ties.