Since the adoption of the European Employment Strategy and the Lisbon strategy, convergence of social protection goals and labour market policies across EU countries features prominently on the European agenda. Embedded in convergence, Europeanisation and welfare state literature, this paper...

A major question for the comparative analysis of industrial relations and labour market institutions has been the extent to which labour laws in different countries have converged or diverged over time. A second question is whether any convergence between labour law systems is associated with...

Variation in living standards across Europe, especially in income, has decreased over the last few decades, but the last recession brought convergence to a halt. This paper asks, first, whether sigma-convergence is found when other dimensions of inequality are taken into account, and second,...

Convergence of social protection objectives and policies in member states is an explicit objective of the EU. Earlier research has shown that there has indeed been a tendency of convergence of social protection levels over the last decades. However, comparative studies frequently use indicators...

This paper analyses the effects of EU regional policy transfer payments on net migration flows among the EU-28 countries. The hypothesis is tested that EU transfer payments do hamper internal migration across the EU. On the one hand, this is done by reestimating the results found by Egger,...

Unemployment in the European Union (EU) is a serious problem that threatens to disrupt the integration of accession countries, the character of individual countries, and the continued existence of the EU. European integration poses a huge conundrum for European employment because the...

It is generally held, from both a global and a European perspective, that the three most impor-tant objectives for the years to come are 1) the reduction of current account imbalances, 2) the reduction of public deficits, and 3) the reduction of unemployment. This paper argues that the Stability...

We analyse the dynamics of the standard deviation of demand shocks and of the demand component of GDP across countries in the European Monetary Union (EMU). This analysis allows us to evaluate the patterns of cyclical comovement in EMU and put them in contrast to the cyclical performance of the...

The general objective of this study is to evaluate regional disparities and the territorial convergence under the impact of the cohesion policy, in the context of the European Union integration. The specific objectives on which the research included in this work focused are the following:...

In our analysis, we examine the convergence of all recent ten European Union (EU) members to EU standards. Novel features of the paper include more complete measures of convergence, in particular fiscal convergence; a broader examination of inflation convergence with respect to the Maastricht...