Land use and land use change are determined as much by economic and institutional drivers as they depend on bio-physical conditions. Future pathways of socio-economic and environmental systems can only be assessed with scenarios which describe possible future paths of development. For this...

To show global leadership and to foster the international negotiations for a long term international climate regime the EU has decided to reduce its GHG emissions by 20% relative to 1990 until the year 2020. These reductions will even rise to 30% "if there is an international agreement...

Using enterprise data for the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS, this study examines the effects of corruption on productivity. Corruption is defined as a “bribe tax” and is compared to another form of institutional inefficiency, which is often believed to be closely linked...

The European Emissions Trading Scheme for CO2 established in 2005 is the world's largest emissions trading scheme. Since it covers only some sectors of the European economies it can nevertheless not ensure that the Kyoto targets are reached at minimal cost. This paper first analyzes the...

Marine and coastal ecosystems – and thus the benefits they create for humans – are subject to increasing pressures and competing usages. For this reason, the European Union (EU) adopted the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), which is to guide future maritime policy in the EU and...

We project the path of the public debt and primary surpluses for a number of countries in the euro area under a fiscal rule based on a set of estimated fiscal policy reaction functions. Our fiscal rule represents a fiscal analogue to a well-known monetary policy rule, and it is calibrated using...

We formulate and estimate a simple fiscal policy reaction function for the euro area and individual euro area countries. Our reaction function allows for primary surpluses to feature three components: an anti-cyclical response of primary surpluses to the output gap, a response to the debt-GDP...

It is conventionally held that countries are worse off by forming a monetary union when it comes to macroeconomic stabilization. However, this conventional view relies on assuming that monetary policy is conducted optimally. Relaxing the assumption of optimal monetary policy not only uncovers...

This paper studies the effects of ECB communications about unconventional monetary policy operations on the perceived sovereign risk of Italy over the last five years. More than fifty events concerning non-standard operations are identified and classified with respect to the specific ECB...

This paper estimates the costs of EU restraints on trade in textiles and clothing. After explaining the methods used, we examine the impact of an opening up of EU trade in textiles and clothing, inter alia to those economies where the textile and clothing (T&C) industries command sizeable shares...