Population ageing affects most countries, especially developed ones. The elderly have increased in number as a result of increased longevity and a parallel decline in fertility. This phenomenon is placing an increasing burden on the young to finance intergenerational transfers to the old, which...

Since the 1960's, the EU has offered trade preferences to developing countries in a complex set of systems. Broadly these systems can be divided into preferences for African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, Mediterranean preferences and the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP). We...

In this paper, we analyze how the offshoring of services by Swedish firms is affected by corruption in target economies. The results suggest that firms avoid corrupt countries and that corruption reduces the amount of offshored services. In addition, the sensitivity to corruption is highest for...

The aim of the paper is to analyse the factors behind the rapid trade integration of the Central and Eastern European countries with the euro area in the past ten years and to gauge the potential for further integration. We use as benchmark an enhanced gravity model estimated with a large sample...

This paper analyses trade specialisation dynamics in two Eastern European countries(Romania and Bulgaria – EEC-2) vis-à-vis the core EU member states (EU-15) over theperiod 1990-2006. Specifically, we focus on whether there is a shift towards intra-industrytrade leading to economic...

This paper documents that changes in assortative mating patterns over the last four decades along the dimensions of age, ethnicity, religion and education are not responsible for the increasing marital instability in Austria. Quite the contrary, without the rise in the age at marriage, divorce...

This study reviews and evaluates the motives and incentives behind immigrants' religiosity, focusing on the two sides of the Atlantic - Europe and the United States. The contribution of the study is mainly empirical, trying to identify indicators for the type of incentive - whether immigrants'...

The most popular approach to modelling and forecasting mortality rates is the model of Lee and Carter (Modeling and Forecasting U. S. Mortality, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 87, 659–671, 1992). The popularity of the model rests mainly on its good fit to the data, its...

Many countries consider the residential concentration among immigrants a problem. This paper studies the factors influencing individual location decisions and evaluates a Swedish attempt to change the residential distribution of refugee immigrants in the late 1980's. Despite common perceptions,...

This paper provides a statistical analysis of the attitudes towards foreigners displayed by European citizens. It is found that, holding other things constant, unemployed Europeans do not have more negative attitudes towards foreigners than the employed. On the other hand, an increased...