The European Union has set out a new strategy for growth and competitiveness. A successor to the Lisbon agenda, the 2020 strategy aims to usher Europe into an era of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. It is of tremendous importance that Europe speeds up growth. Fiscal stabilization can...

In this paper, we will discuss how Europe makes digital policy and how its digital economic performance can be improved. The focus is on the D9+ initiative. Launched in 2016 on the initiative of former Swedish trade minister, Ann Linde, nine countries with a particular interest in matters of the...

The role of intellectual property rights for the world economy has increased over the past decades. Industrial countries have climbed the value-added chain by sourcing labourintensive production from emerging countries and investing substantially more human and capital resources into research...

In this paper we discuss what needs to be done in a number of key policy areas. Certainly, the EU should focus on fields where benefits for all of Europe can be produced, and should withdraw from policy areas where this is not the case. Furthermore, deeper economic and political integration is...

Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. While this statement is widely accepted in terms of a long-run relationship, the quantity theory has been made operational also for the short-run dynamics of inflation by so-called Pstar models. An error correction model with quarterly data for the Euro Area...

Sino-European trade relations have been controversially discussed mainly, if not only, because of the increasing European Union's bilateral trade deficit with China. As from the European perspective trade with China becomes more important, the structural adjustment process of the Chinese economy...

How do different components of the tax and transfer systems affect disposable income inequality? This paper explores the redistributive effects of different tax benefit instruments in the enlarged EU based on two approaches. Inequality analysis based on the standard approach suggests that...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the...

This paper investigates to what extent the tax and transfer systems in Europe protect households at different income levels against losses in current income caused by economic downturns like the present financial crisis. We use a multi country micro simulation model to analyse how shocks on...