THE IMPACTS OF COMMON COMMERCIAL POLICY ON EXPORT PERFORMANCES OF VISEGRAD COUNTRIES.

The paper aims to investigate the impact of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) and common commercial policy (CCP) on export performances of Visegrad group of countries (The Visegrad Four, V-4: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary) preceding and following the EU accession. The V-4, before becoming the EU members, have participated actively in regionalism, signing free trade agreements and customs unions which often also resulted in the extended economic integration. But since the EU accession in 2004, all RTAs of the new members were no longer valid as these countries became the parties of the CCP of the EU. To analyse whether CCP was beneficial on the export performances of the V-4 countries, we estimate the augmented gravity model by employing Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood (PPML) estimator for time periods before and after the EU accession, in 1999-2003 and 2004-2013, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]