Identifying European Economic Integration and Globalization: A Review of Concepts and Measures

Krieger-Boden C. and Soltwedel R. Identifying European economic integration and globalization: a review of concepts and measures, Regional Studies. Processes of regional economic integration such as the European integration process have been shaping the economic relations between countries significantly during the last decades. At the same time an increasing integration of all national economies into the global economy has affected these economic relations, too. In an effort to contribute to operationalizing these integration processes for the purpose of empirical analyses, this paper reviews the concepts and actual measures of European integration and globalization. In particular, it discusses ways of separating the effects of European integration from those of globalization, thereby also reducing problems of endogeneity and collinearity.