The forces of the market and systems competition bring about economic and social convergence in Europe. There is no need for social policies at the EU level. Social harmonisation would distort migration flows and slow down the speed of economic convergence. National welfare states will be...

This study analyses the impact of economic catching-up on annual inflation rates in the European Union with a special focus on the new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using an array of estimation methods, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect is not an important driver of...

We use Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to evaluate the robustness of determinants of economic growth in a new dataset of 255 European regions in the 1995-2005 period. We use three different specifications based on (1) the cross-section of regions, (2) the cross-section of regions with country...

The EU's cohesion policy should now be confluent with the goals of the Lisbon strategy by promoting growth and employment. In this context, the promotion of a concept called regional innovation system has recently become important in the EU for guaranteeing long-term regional economic growth....

After the eastern enlargement of the European Union due to increasing labor market integration, wage determination and monetary integration in Central and Eastern Europe have become key issues in European economic policy making. Based on the Scandinavian model of wage adjustment by Lindbeck...

The paper scrutinizes the role of wages and capital flows for competitiveness in the new EU member states in the context of real convergence. For this purpose it extends the seminal Balassa-Samuelson model by international capital markets. The augmented Balassa-Samuelson model is linked to the...

We argue that if currency union member states have different potential output per capita, output growth rates, or trade balances, the common monetary policy may not be optimal for all of them. Euro area imbalances for potential output and for trade balances are quite large, while output growth...