Regional unemployment rates in the European Union (EU-15) reveal a core-periphery structure. Large ?core? regions in the middle of the continent have low unemployment rates, whereas excessive mass unemployment is predominantly found in the peripheral regions at the outside borders of EU-15. This...

This paper takes a welfare-view on eastern enlargement of the EU, focusing on incumbent countries. Enlargement is decomposed into three elements: Single-market integration on commodity markets, budgetary costs from EU-expenditure policies, and singlemarket- induced migration from new to present...

The question of how to share the costs of the measures to be taken against global warming is one of the most controversial questions in the international climate policy debate, and is, as yet, unsettled. The burden sharing agreement (BSA) reached by EU Member States is a rare example of a...

We estimate the speed of income convergence for a sample of 196 European NUTS 2 regions over the period 1985-1999. So far there is no direct estimator available for dynamic panels with strong spatial dependencies. We propose a two-step procedure, which involves first spatial filtering of the...

It is widely recognised that public-sector purchasers tend to discriminate in favour of domestic suppliers. We study the consequences of home-biased public procurement on international specialisation. In the theoretical analysis we find two effects. First, a country will specialise in the sector...

The paper proposes a technique to jointly tests for groupings of unknown size in the cross sectional dimension of a panel and estimates the parameters of each group, and applies it to identifying convergence clubs in income per-capita. The approach uses the predictive density of the data,...

This paper estimates and forecasts trend output and output gaps for the Euro area. In the monetary strategy of the European Central Bank (ECB), trend output is used to forecast a reference value for money. For this purpose, trend output must be forecasted as well. In this paper, a...

The aim of this paper was to shift the focus from a negative prejudice about immigration towards a much more positive evaluation. More and more the migration pattern changes from a blue-collar migration of low qualified workers towards a whitecollar mobility of highly skilled professionals. It...