Presentation

At the World level, as could be seen during and after Uruguay Round of the GATT (just as the case of intraregional level), agricultural trade is usually one of the most conflictive issues when different countries try to reach bilateral or multilateral agreements. Such feature is particularly visible in the case of European Union- and the so called Eastern and Southern Mediterranean countries relationships. Within agricultural trade, fruit and fresh vegetables is probably the most sensible sector within that kind of negotiations.

Thus, international competition faced by the European farmers (and also their fear to the increasing presence of products of southern and eastern Mediterranean countries) seem to entry in confrontation with the expectations of these countries to increase their exports in order to promote their economic growth. In this issue, the first article is developed in the Euro-Mediterranean Agreements framework, defined in the Barcelona process (a geo-political proposal made by Spain, that started in 1995), and then it was reactivated by the Union for the Mediterranean.

Here, Jose Mª Garcia-Alvarez-Coque (head professor at the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, UPV, and also researcher of the International Economics Group, GEI), proposes an approximate explanation in relation with the increase of the European Mediterranean products (particularly refereed to the fruit and fresh vegetables case), fits to trade liberalization process.

In the second section, Victor Martinez (professor of UPV and GEI's researcher) together with Maitane Arrieta (undergraduate student at UPV) present a brief analysis of Moroccan-European Union trade. After a short characterization of Southern Mediterranean Countries - European Union trade, the authors estimate some trading complementarity indexes, for the whole agricultural flows, as well as the fruit and fresh vegetables sector.

Finally, the issues Nº 8 includes the traditional section "Miscellaneous", where some academic and scientific events related with international economics are referenced.