This book brings together the work of researchers in Eastern and Western Europe, who analyze competitiveness, social exclusion and sustainability from a range of perspectives. It examines the key challenges faced by the EU in its efforts to establish a socially inclusive and greener path to...

We investigate the relative contributions of migrant and native households to welfare states. Using two step Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions that control for selection into benefit take-up, we are able to identify the individual variables contributing to differences in welfare receipt by native...

Migration and Regional Convergence in the European Union European migration trends in the last decade have been marked by a number of spectacular changes. In the course of the recent enlargement immigration to some EU15 countries from the CEECs has become remarkable. Nevertheless, the vast...

This project focuses on comparing the qualification structure of migrants residing in Austria as well as their over- and underqualification rates to other EU countries. The skill structure of foreign born residing in Austria has improved slightly in the last years. Austria is, however,...

The migration literature shows that cross-border skill transfer is associated with a risk of increased job-education mismatch. This paper examines whether the problems of job-education mismatch often found among migrants also apply to cross-border commuters and compares cross-border commuters to...

Based on questionnaires conducted among PES organizations as well as Pacts and LEIs (Pacts/LEIs) in 40 cities of 12 EU member states and 2 non-EU member states - we take stock of the preconditions for conducting local labour market policies in an urban context in Europe and analyse the...

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 experiences of 259 regions in 21 European countries with within country GDP per capita and labour productivity growth suggest that variables associated with pro-active, growth oriented strategies are consistently more important predictors of successful regional development than variables...