The global economic crisis sets the idea of competitiveness and the ways of its achieving in the center of the economic debate. According to the comparative analyses and studies, Bulgaria is among the countries with lowest competitiveness in EU. At the same time the country is required to...

Economists broadly agree on many key economic policy issues, but economics as a discipline has provided much less guidance on why and how economic policy reform occurs and how to develop institutional mechanisms that enable governments to adopt “good” economic policy. Political scientists...

This paper illustrates the sensitivity of political attitudes to the business cycle. It shows how the 2008 economic crisis has reshaped individual support for democracy and market liberalization in post-transition countries. Pro-reform attitudes have lost ground between 2006 and 2010 in Central...

The global financial crisis of 2007-09 has led to an intensive research program analyzing a wide range of issues related to financial crises. This paper presents a summary of a forthcoming book, Financial Crises: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses, that includes 19 contributions...

This paper reviews the literature on financial crises focusing on three specific aspects. First, what are the main factors explaining financial crises? Since many theories on the sources of financial crises highlight the importance of sharp fluctuations in asset and credit markets, the paper...

Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is limited to few reforms, countries, and periods. This paper studies the effect of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital and banking sectors, product...

Having reached a peak in 2002, Croatia's GDP growth lost momentum thereafter due to restrictive economic policy measures prompted by rising external and internal imbalances. The current account deficits, averaging 6-7% of the country's GDP over the past few years, were primarily the consequence...

We present a comparison of rates of employment by sector and gender in 17 Spanish regions related with real value-added per capita by sector. We also present a comparison of 96 EU regions at NUTS1 level. We find that employment opportunities in services have strong positive effect on female...

Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is scarce, limited to few reforms and countries and for few years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital, public, and...

This paper examines the determinants of technological catching-up across 63 countries over the period 1982-2000 using a two staged approach. In the first stage, a measure of the technology gap between countries and the global technology frontier is computed. A positive growth of this measure is...