The Maastricht criteria for accession to the euro area can be difficult for any economy to achieve, not least because of the challenges posed by the “impossible trinity”, which suggests that it is not possible to target both a stable exchange rate and stable inflation at the same time as...

This study analyses the impact of economic catching-up on annual inflation rates in the European Union with a special focus on the new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using an array of estimation methods, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect is not an important driver of...

After nearly fifteen years of transition, the countries of Central Europe have entered the European Union on 1 May 2004. For the four countries that are members of the OECD (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovak Republic), accession follows multiyear efforts of economic stabilisation and...

Economic inequality has increased in many EU countries in the last decades. Yet, efforts assessing economic disparities across the EU regions mostly concentrate on convergence in average per capita incomes, offering much less evidence on how regional income is distributed. Using data from...

Using Portugal's extensive matched employer-employee data set, this paper documents an unusual feature of the Portuguese economy. For decades, the entire Portuguese firm size distribution has been shifting to the left. We argue in this paper that Portugal's shrinking firms are linked to the...

Services play a more important role in trade and employment in the United Kingdom than in most other OECD countries. The UK services sector is supported by an open and transparent trade regime, policies that support competition and innovation, and regulatory transparency that facilitates the...