Credibility and financing problems are important reasons why countries may seek to involve external institutions in the design and implementation of stabilization programs. In particular, governments may rely on external institutions to ‘enforce’ programs that would otherwise lack...

The volume begins with an Introduction, followed by a set of three papers in Part Two examining European urban competitiveness from the standpoints of measurement and policy. This section also provides a case study of the cities of one country - Italy - from which the reader can gain an...

1. The rapidly changing world economy -- 2. The great recession -- 3. Global finance and payments imbalances -- 4. The role of monetary policy -- 5. The post-crisis world -- 6. China's prospects and challenges -- 7. The US external position -- 8. The redback, the greenback and the troubled euro...

This study finds that equity returns in the banking sector in the wake of the Great Recession and the European sovereign debt crisis have been driven mainly by weak growth prospects and heightened sovereign risk and to a lesser extent, by deteriorating funding conditions and investor sentiment....

The European railway sector has gone through profound, yet mostly institutional, changes over the past 20 years, owing mainly to the initiatives of the European Commission. This book constitutes a first systematic account and assessment of the recent transformations of the European railway...

The group of contributors in this book come from academia and international organizations in Europe and the USA. They focus on trade unions, which affect real-wage flexibility and the provision of training to workers. They also concentrate on employment protection legislation, which discourages...

In the long aftermath of the acute global financial crisis of 2008/09, the need to get economies back on track and to handle high levels of public and private debt has created conflicting objectives. Challenges yet to be mastered are the need to avoid counterproductive measures of adjustment and...

There is much confusion in the economics literature on wage determination and the employment-inflation trade-off. Few model builders pay as much careful attention to the definition and meaning of long-run concepts as did Albert Ando. Expanding on years of painstaking work by Ando, the...

This book provides a systematic, comprehensive, and independent comparative study of cluster policies in Europe. It focuses upon one very important relationship that has so far been neglected in the literature, namely, the extent to which the complex dynamics of multi-level governance (MLG) are...

High levels of economic policy uncertainty in various parts of the world revamped the de- bate about its impact on economic activity. With increasingly stronger economic, financial, and political ties among countries, economic agents have more reasons to be vigilant of for- eign economic policy....