Implications of the European integration: revisiting the hypothesis of ‘hub-and-spokes’ model

ABSTRACT

Already in 1994, Baldwin predicted the formation of the ‘hub-and-spokes’ model to describe the outcomes of economic integration across the European Union (EU) implying marginalization of the new EU member states. We examine the validity of this hypothesis by putting an emphasis on Visegrad group of countries (The Visegrad four (V-4): Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) and investigate the impact of the European integration scheme on their export performances. To conduct the analysis, we estimate the augmented gravity model for the panel data of the exports of V-4 with the rest of the world by employing pseudo-Poisson maximum likelihood estimator. Estimation results do not favour the creation of the ‘hub-and-spokes’ model, but rather demonstrate that integration within the EU was quite beneficial for V-4 without giving the origin neither to their peripherization nor to the loss of markets of the natural trade partners.

KEYWORDS:

• European integration
• international trade
• regionalism
• gravity model
• Visegrad group

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Tinatin Akhvlediani is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw; and a visiting scholar at Indiana University and the University of Vienna.

Dr. Katarzyna Śledziewska is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw; and Executive Director of Digital Economy Lab.

ORCID

Katarzyna Śledziewska http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0824-4582

Notes

1. To avoid collinearity, NMS contain all the countries that became members of the EU by or after 2004, excluding V-4.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Centre of Poland [DEC-2013/11/B/HS4/01040].