Europe’s Global Linkages and the Impact of the Financial Crisis: Policies for Sustainable Trade, Capital Flows, and Migration

One research output which evolved within the framework of this project has recently attracted wide interest of the Spanish media.

The study The Great Trade Collapse and the Spanish Export Miracle by Peter Eppinger (University of Tübingen), Nicole Meythaler (IAW Tübingen), Marc-Manuel Sindlinger (University of Bonn) and Marcel Smolka (University of  Aarhus, Denmark) uses detailed firm level data to analyse the surprisingly positive development of exports within the Spanish manufacturing industry in the years since the global financial crisis of 2008: While the number of Spanish Exporters and Importers did not diminish due to the crisis, exporting firms even increased their international activity to compensate for the weak domestic demand. The study shows that, compared to domestic firms, exporters proved to be more robust to the crisis, they shrank their workforce less and could maintain their productivity level.

Thus, in contrary to popular belief, the Spanish economy did extremely well on international markets and outperformed not only other European countries in economic downturn (such as Italy), but also countries with a much more robust economic performance (such as Germany).

The study is freely available at [IAW Discussion Paper No. 120 – Link: http://www.iaw.edu/index.php/iaw-discussion-papers].

Among others, the Spanish newspaper [ABC.es  – Link: http://www.abc.es/economia/20150410/abci-milagro-exportador-espana-201504101509.html] has reported these findings.

Further information and publications related to the project are available at www.iaw.edu/glic.

Led by the IAW, the project brings together leading researchers from six countries and three continents. The VW foundation supports this project within its program “Europe and Global Challenges”.