With twelve new members the decision making in the European Union via intergovernmental cooperation will become ineffective. In order to avoid a Stagno-Europe the EU has a choice: Either it looks for the very essentials in the common institutional frame or the member states agree in ceding...

With twelve new members the decision making in the European Union via intergovernmental cooperation will become ineffective. The EU is at the Cross Roads. In order to avoid a Stagno-Europe the EU has a choice: Either it looks for the very essentials in the common institutional framework and...

This paper analyzes pension reforms in Europe and their determinants. As pension reforms are intrinsically difficult to define and pinpoint, we introduce an alternative measure of pension reforms by comparing long-term forecasts of pension expenditures for seventeen European countries. The...

The paper applies standard public choice reasoning to the negotiations on EU enlargement and the Treaty of Nice. The starting point is the assumption that accession can only be successfully completed if the interests of decisive actors in present EU countries are respected. Decisive actors in...

In this paper we argue that strong political economy forces explain the rush of the EU to expand eastwards. We use a model of vertical product differentiation in order to claim that technologically- advanced EU firms (residing in high-income member countries) prefer a mutual market-opening with...

Exchange-rate policies of Central Eastern European Countries (CEEC) have often been a subject matter. Yet, some new insights in terms of political economy considerations upon exchange-rate policy are provided. It is pointed out that it is more appropriate to analyse exchange-rate policy in...

This article is an attempt to synthetically present and test the main conclusions of the State-as-Leviathan model which was developed in a classical text The Power to Tax. Analytical Foundations of Fiscal Constitution (Buchanan, Brennan 1980). In the first part the main assumptions of the model...

The main purpose of this study is to assess the changing landscape of agricultural protection and taxation patterns in the region. The study is based on the EU-10 sample, plus Turkey, as well as seven countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS): Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, the...