The expansion of information & communication technology (ICT) is continuing in OECD countries and the world economy – partly due to the ongoing fall of relative ICT prices. The continuing absolute fall of ICT prices and ICT capital prices, respectively, is not adequately considered in the...

Summary: The traditional discussion about CO2 emissions and greenhouse gases as a source of global warming has been rather static, namely in the sense that innovation dynamics have not been considered much. Given the global nature of the climate problem, it is natural to develop a more dynamic...

For many decades culture has been considered to have a significant impact on the productivity of people. This study observes for the Russian Federation, on the basis of the ARENA study by Sreda, the impact of the share of the most prominent religious groups on economic output as well as on...

Due to its transition process in the decades 1990 - 2010 Russia has experienced a change in its regional structure. Its design is characterized by a core-periphery structure, where one can see that Russia has more than one economic core. The insight gained from this study is that convergence...

Regions differ from each other not only in their economic structure but concerning the impact they have on their neighbors. In the present study interregional spillover activities are analyzed for the regions of the Russian Federation. Instead of knowledge spillovers, more general growth...

In economic geography all indicators and studies are based in one way or another on a measure of distances between two points of interest. The present study discusses the problems that arise in the course of calculating distances between regions. It is shown that measures presently in use are...

From a microeconomic perspective competition between firms has been duely discussed. Extending microeconomic concepts to a macroeconomic level and considering competition between countries becomes more complex. The complexity issues is tackled in this study by extending a methodology developed...

Taking a closer look at the EU’s approach to enhanced surveillance, one finds that the approach of coordinated surveillance of autonomous fiscal policies of Euro member states is unlikely to deliver meaningful results. The widespread public perception that there is a general debt crisis in the...

The Transatlantic Banking Crisis has strongly raised debt-GDP ratios in many OECD countries and this is undermining the economic recovery. As regards the euro zone there are special problems which are partly related to lack of fiscal discipline in Greece and to the Irish economic crisis which...

This analysis takes a closer look at the costs and risks of nuclear energy – including the considerable shadow subsidies allocated to nuclear power – a crucial issue after the Fukushima accident. The liability insurance in Germany covers only ¼ of the damages covered in the US, but in both...