The present analysis deals with the relationship of the EU budget and its resources with the Lisbon process. The EU Commission speaks for many years about a lack of transparency in financial relations between Member States and the EU. It even says that the current system fulfils very well the...

This analysis first of all shows with the latest empirical regional and other statistics of the OECD the true dimension of the Lisbon gap between Europe and the Western overseas democracies. The neo-liberal politicy consensus in Europe always assumed that the continuation of neo-liberal...

The European Union’s center-piece of economic policy making is the Lisbon process, which tries to make Europe the most competitive economic region in the world economy by 2010. EU Commission President Jose Manuel Durao Barroso recently presented a Centre for European Reform (CER) study that...

This research paper compares the cross national effects of pension reform on 33 indicators of social, economic, political and ecological well-being of nations with the effects on these 33 variables by dependency, the adherence to the advice by international financial institutions, world...

This article portrays a bleak picture of European realities. Analyzing world social, gender, ecological and economic development on the basis of the main 9 predictors, compatible with the majority of the more than 240 published studies on the cross-national determinants of the “human...

The publication surveys the major existing evidence from EUROSTAT and UN/World Bank sources and comes to the depressing conclusion that there is practically no real convergence of social conditions in Europe over the last years. Instead, the gaps between East and West, and between South and...

The article shows that the option of Turkish accession to the EU is far better than the continued non-accession. The articles analyses in quantitative terms the trajectory of Turkey's candidacy and shows pure "technical" terms Turkey's achievements in social and health policy are not an...

For many years, EU-27-Europe’s political-economic strategy was characterized by an intensive opening to the forces of globalization and the realization of the ‘four freedoms’ of goods, capital, labour and services on the EU-27-European ‘internal market’. The present article is a 175...

For some years now, the Happy Planet Organization presents the so-called ‘Happy Planet Index’ (HPI), which is an index of measuring the trade-off between ecological footprint data and life quality (Happy Life Years, HLYE). Costa Rica emerges from these comparisons as the world’s ‘best...

This article looks at the long-term, structural determinants of environmental performance in the world system. In multiple standard OLS regression models, we test the effects of 26 standard predictor variables, including the ‘four freedoms’ of goods, capital, labour and services, on the...