The consumer cooperatives have the longtime tradition and perspective in the world. The Czech consumer cooperatives have been gone through a favourable time periods and a less favourable time periods in their history. This article presents the main problematic spheres of current cooperative...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom in European economic history that long-distance maritime transport was always more cost-effective than overland trade routes. Thus the majority of historians in the past century have attributed the rapid decline of the medieval Champagne Fairs,...

Using data from U.S. commodity flow survey, we show that the historical Union-Confederacy border lowers contemporaneous trade between U.S. states by about 13%. The finding is robust over econometric models, survey waves, or aggregation levels. Including contemporaneous controls, such as network...

This paper summarizes the state of knowledge on internal barriers to trade in goods, services and flows of capital, examines their cost to the economy, and presents some options for addressing the important barriers that remain. A companion paper examines barriers to labour mobility in Canada...

In the face of continuing financial and economic crises, the European Investment Bank (EIB) has been criticized for being overly-conservative in its loans to Europe. Critics in particular have called on the EIB to vastly increase its investment in utilities as a counter-cyclical measure. To take...

In the face of continuing financial and economic crises, the European Investment Bank (EIB) has been criticized for being overly-conservative in its loans to Europe. Critics in particular have called on the EIB to vastly increase its investment in utilities as a counter-cyclical measure. To take...

One of the consequences of major regulatory reform of the telecommunications sector from the end of the 1970s – particularly, privatization, liberalization and deregulation – was the establishment of a new business environment which permitted former national telecommunications monopolies to...

The energy security is a growing concern both of the EU governments, and of Brussels. The European officials have been working on a strategy that should ensure the energy security of the Union. Some of the main courses of action are as follows: increasing the energy output from regenerative...

Since its inception, the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been discussed controversely. Data from the OECD and the World Bank show that the protectionist effects of the CAP between the 1960s and the 1980s were larger than those of its national predecessors. Moreover, there...