WIFO coordinates the interdisciplinary four year research project "Welfare, Wealth and Work for Europe – WWWforEurope" within the 7th Framework Programme funded by the European Commission. The project brings together researchers from 33 scientific institutions in 12 European countries with...

Austria is a country with a historically strong intervention of government. Specifically a large part of the manufacturing sector and electricity had been nationalised after World War II, combined with public ownership in telecommunication, transport and banking this created one of the largest...

Economic growth is neither in Austria nor in the EU as a whole strong enough as to make substantial inroads into unemployment. Against this background, the European Council of last March assigned the highest priority to the goals of growth and employment and invited each member state to...

The Austrian Federal Government has set itself the goal to reduce the Maastricht deficit to 2.7 percent of the GDP by 2013. In the medium term, a consolidation of the public budgets will be necessary to regain room for manoeuvre for budget policy and to avoid undesirable distributive effects of...

High-wage countries can compete with low-wage competitors only by increasing productivity or by upgrading quality. Usually upgrading of quality is regarded as difficult to measure. The current study proposes different indicators to measure quality and applies these indicators to assess the...

The article investigates how the structure of manufacturing changes in the EU countries over the past 15 years: it presents evidence about the specialisation of countries in production and exports in general and whether the share of the most important industries is decreasing or increasing under...

The growth in manufacturing output and productivity is related to several indicators of innovation activities: research, human capital, knowledge, capabilities and the use of information and communication technology. Additionally, the need for restructuring forced mature and capital-intensive...