Austria is a small open economy that in the last decades underwent two different waves of increasing trade integration: one
with Eastern Europe and one with China. This paper studies the effects of increases in trade with China and Eastern Europe
on labour market dynamics in Austrian NUTS-4 regions for two ten-year periods between 1995 and 2015. Given the limited data
available, the current analysis could not identify significant effects on aggregate labour dynamics neither for rising imports
from Eastern Europe or China, nor for rising exports to Eastern Europe. However, there is weak evidence that exports to China
have facilitated employment growth, especially in high quality segments. Overall, these results add a cautious perspective
to the discussion of import competition.
Agricultural support levels are at a crossroad with reduced distortions in OECD countries and increasing support for agricultural
producers in emerging economies over the last decades. This paper studies the determinants of distortions in the agricultural
markets by putting a specific focus on the role of trade policy. Applying different dynamic panel data estimators and explicitly
accounting for potential endogeneity of trade policy agreements, we find that an increase in the number of bilateral free
trade agreements exhibits significant short- and long-run distortion reducing effects. By contrast, WTO's Uruguay Agreement
on Agriculture has not been able to systematically contribute to a reduction in agriculture trade distortions. From a policy
point of view our findings thus point to a lack of effectiveness of multilateral trade negotiations.