The recent admission of Slovakia into the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) stands in sharp contrast with the considerable difficulties faced by Hungary with the fulfillment of the Maastricht criteria. This is a puzzling development for two reasons: first, during the early phase of the...

The fiscal regime of new EU member states is dictated by the Stability and Growth Pact by virtue of EU membership and, for EMU candidates such as all new EU members are supposed to become soon, by the Maastricht Treaty. Such dual fiscal regime is somewhat perverse: Maastricht conditions in the...

Some years ago one would have predicted very different scenarios for Slovakia and Croatia. The difference was twofold. On the one hand, both paths have shaped significantly different from the previous expectations. On the other hand, the paths of the two have been very different from each other,...

It must be admitted that in modern economies, financial systems play an important role in allocating scarce resources, helping channel individual or household savings to the corporate sector, and allocate funds among companies. The two main pillars of the financial system are the banking system...

This paper investigates the productivity performance of CEE countries vis-à-vis the EU-15 during the 1990s to detect sources of convergence between the two regions. The paper shows that changes in labour intensity have been an important source of productivity convergence during the 1990s, and...

This paper is based on past and current research about Information Society developments in an Enlarged Europe, and in particular in the New EU Member States and the Candidate Countries, carried out at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, a research institute of the Joint Research...

Fiscal policy in Poland faces challenges both in the view of the critical position of public finance in the recent years and the UE accession. The Polish economy performance in the Union, when assessed from the perspective of the participation in the euro area, requires not only the fulfilment...