While barriers to trade between EU-15 and accession countries have been completely abolished on May 1st 2004, other integration impediments remain to exist in the enlarged EU. These will steadily decrease within the next years, e.g. by new member states joining the Schengen Treaty and Euro area....

Border regions are likely to play a critical role within the special dynamics initiated by the enlargement of the EU. This paper deals with the effects of integration on labour market conditions in border regions. Within the framework of different theoretical approaches the effects of...

Border regions and border effects currently attract a lot of attention in political practice and economic research. Substantial interest in regions located along the frontiers of integrating countries is predominantly inspired by the presumption that their specific geographic position might...

National borders within the European Union have significantly lost importance during the last decades. That is because the costs for the movement of goods, services, production factors and information across borders continuously decreased in the course of advancing integration. Lower distance...

Increasing inequality in qualification specific employment prospects characterises labour markets in most highly developed countries. Theoretical models suggest that in-plant skill segregation might matter for the polarization of employment and wages. According to these models production...

The population growth of cities in industrialized countries is characterized by striking disparities. While some cities experience a kind of resurgence in recent years others suffer from an ongoing depopulation. In this context an important issue refers to the question whether labour market...

We investigate the convergence process among EU regions between 1980-2002 taking into account the effects of spatial heterogeneity and spatial spillover effects. The spatial regimes model allows for different steady-state growth paths. In contrast to previous analyses, the regimes in this paper...

Recent theoretical research deals with economic costs and benefits of cultural diversity related to immigration. Empirical evidence regarding the impact of cultural diversity on economic performance is still scarce. This paper aims at investigating the effects of diversity on innovation and at...

A basic result of new economic geography models is that the proximity to consumer markets impacts wages and employment within regions. While there is a bulk of theoretical literature on new economic geography related empirical tests are still scarce. The present paper aims at providing some...