EBA- en förändring eller endast bra i teorin?

Sammanfattning: Trade has for long been seen as the most efficient and important measure to increase the economy and welfare for a country. Therefore, several industrialized countries have agreed on different benefit trade agreements towards the LDC countries. One of these trade agreements is the ‘Everything But Arms’ agreement between the European Union and the LDC. However, these trade agreements have been criticized for not fulfilling their purpose in increasing the export from the LDCs. By using different estimations of the gravity model this study aims to examine if the EBA agreement has led to an increase in the export from the LDC countries to the European Union. The empirical part of this study contains panel data from several countries with over 62 000 observations between 1990-2015. The importing countries represent all 23 members of EU-23 and the LDCs members of EBA represent our exporters. As part of our empirical strategy we also add control groups with different importer countries as well as different exporting countries. As a result we got negative significant results which show that the EBA agreement does not increase the export for the LDCs. In fact it even decreases the export from the world's poorest countries during some years.