The European Union and its Member States have been engaged in product market reforms over a long period with notable reforms including the Single Market Program and the Lisbon Agenda launched in March 2000. Product market reforms are seen as exerting both a direct and an indirect impact on...

An attempt to quantify possible negative effects of external crises in emerging market economies is made in this paper. The direct and indirect effects of the external crises, here sudden stops in capital flows and currency crises, are estimated and compounded into composite overall effects. In...

According to economic theory, the capital inflows reversal – so-called sudden stop – has a significant negative effect on economic growth. This paper investigates the direct impact of current account reversals on growth in Central and Eastern European countries. Two steps to conduct the...

We use two methodologies, the least square dummy variables approach and the dynamic factor models, to decompose the labor productivity growth rate for a large sample of countries into common, i.e. global, and idiosyncratic, i.e. country, components. We find that country specific effects are much...

This paper presents an empirical study of GDP per worker (and per capita) convergence across German labour market regions during 1992 to 2002 using nonparametric techniques. There is evidence for a tendency towards convergence during the observed period, i.e. regions that were less productive in...

This paper investigates the determinants of TFP for Italian regions. We find strong evidence in favour of the factors commonly suggested by the theoretical literature. In particular, R&D expenditures and the number of researchers are positively related to regional TFP. Moreover, human capital is...

The Information and Communication technology(ICT) environment in the economic community of west african states(ECOWAS) has changed sufficiently to warrant re-conceptualization of the earlier initiatives. Notably, many new technologies have emerged, especially in the area of wireless...

We estimate output growth rate spectra for 58 countries. The spectra exhibit diverse shapes. To study the sources of this diversity, we estimate the short-run, business cycle, and long-run frequency components of the sampled series. For most OECD countries the bulk of the spectral mass is in the...

The main goal of this essay is to analyze the emergence of a barter economy, and the rise of centralized merchants and a barter redistribution system out of a primitive barter system. The environment is a spatial general equilibrium model where exchange is costly. Since exchange becomes more...

This paper aims to understand some of the mechanisms which dominate the phenomenon of knowledge diffusion in the process that is called ‘interactive learning’. We examine how knowledge spreads in a network in which agents interact by word of mouth. We define a social network structured as a...