This paper investigates the performance of labour markets during the recent crisis for 28 industrialised countries, specifically the reaction of employment and unemployment indicators relative to output changes. We construct a composite indicator for output as well as labour market performance....

There is evidence that a budget consolidation strategy can work with only a small and short lived negative impact on growth. However, this time consolidation is taking place in the aftermath of a deep crisis which had lead to increased levels of uncertainty. In addition the financial sector, as...

Europe is in the throes of budgetary consolidation, tightening its fiscal rules. It could not prevent the recession of 2012 and the inexorable growth of debt, especially in Southern Europe, while unemployment spreads and the social gap widens. Social policy is mostly a national matter, but is...

The southern European periphery suffered a severe setback in its catching-up process versus Western Europe after the financial crisis with GDP dropping by 10% between 2008 and 2012 and unemployment rates increasing to 20% for Greece, Portugal and Spain. We analyse first the reason for this...

The importance of manufacturing for industrialised countries has been reappraised, specifically in the wake of the financial crisis and of China's rise to world no. 1 in manufacturing. A "new industrial policy" should bolster reindustrialisation, different from the old selective and...

The European Union is a successful integration experiment, with an increasing number of member countries and an unexpected depth of integration. According to many indicators, it is the largest economic region in the world, leading in many "beyond GDP" indicators representing well being including...

The growth performance of countries proved to be very different during the recent crisis. We apply principal component analysis to derive a single ordinal indicator on growth performance and to analyse whether initial conditions of economies or structural characteristics can explain the...

Industrial policy is back on the agenda and the consensus is that it must be different "this time" from the past. We redefine industrial policy for industrialised countries as a strategy to promote "high-road competitiveness", understood as the ability of an economy to achieve "Beyond-GDP"'...

The paper characterises a number of welfare state models in the tradition of Esping-Andersen, analysing the economic and social performance of these different welfare regimes on an encompassing empirical basis both in the long run and with respect to their adaptability to the challenges of the...

The financial crisis has brought about an economic recession which is more severe and widespread than any decline in production in the past 50 years. In the USA and Europe the decline in production over the entire economy was, however, much less than during the Great Depression of the 1930s....