This paper sheds light on the export structure of the four European countries Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, the so called PIGS countries. These countries were all hit by the economic downturn in the course of the financial crisis and have been struggling with the national debt crisis and...

The current globalisation process is characterized by the emergence of global value chains. That is, production processes are becoming increasingly geographically fragmented. Not only are final goods traded internationally, but in particular, trade in intermediate goods and services has...

This paper analyses the revealed comparative advantage for six European countries: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK. The results can be summarized as the follows: Italy always had a trade specialisation index which was well above average. Apart from Italy, whose trade...

Walter Eucken was the head of the Freiburg school of economics, a circle of German ordoliberal scholars of the interwar period, whose thoughts were highly influential in the immediate post war period. Being disillusioned by what he called the "age of experiments"- the failure of both classical...

A major aspect of employment growth is discussed in relation to economic growth. This paper deals with the question as to whether the relationship between economic and employment growth, subsumed under the idiom Verdoorn's Law, holds true at the sectoral level. For this reason, the German labor...