Wettbewerbsorientierung bzw. -fähigkeit wurde nach der Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise abermals zum dominierenden wirtschaftspolitischen Leitmotiv in Europa. Die vorliegende Analyse behandelt die Frage, inwieweit dies ökonomisch gerechtfertigt erscheint. Ausgehend von der nach wie vor in fast...

Europe needs change. The financial crisis has exposed long-neglected deficiencies in the present growth path, most visibly in the areas of unemployment and public debt. At the same time, Europe has to cope with new challenges, ranging from globalisation and demographic shifts to new technologies...

We analyze unconditional within-country convergence from 1991 to 2009 in 21 European countries. Unlike most previous studies we focus on the heterogeneity of convergence. We find that convergence processes in currency unions are extremely heterogenous, highly discontinuous and strongly...

The debate on growth versus the environment is usually summarized as optimists believing in limitless growth versus pessimists seeing environmental and resource limits to growth. This opposition defines the main strategies: namely, striving for green growth versus some anti-growth approach. In...

This paper aims to redefine the term competitiveness to enhance its usefulness for the evaluation of country performance and for policy conclusions. We attempt to establish a definition that is adequate if economic policy strives for a new growth path that is more dynamic, socially inclusive and...

We examine Okun's Law on the basis of new growth perspectives and in the context of the WWWForEurope project. By comparing Okun's work from 1962 with the latest IMF and OECD surveys, a connection is set up and Okun's theoretical framework is updated and its persistence is examined. In addition,...

We study how the interaction between economic openness and competitive selection affects the effectiveness of employment (and entry) subsidisation. Within a twocountry heterogeneous-firms model with endogenous labour supply, we find that optimal employment subsidies are always positive even...