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...

Is Europe becoming the world’s leading knowledge-based economic area of the world, as European leaders planned at their Lisbon meeting in 2000? In this article, we analyze the Lisbon performance of the countries of the European Union from a long-term, structural perspective. We examine...

This article provides a new approach to the study of global values, based on a statistical analysis of the freely available data from the World Values Survey, 6th wave of global opinion surveys, which has now been made public. In accordance with economic approaches, we contradict the mainstream...

In this article, we present a first empirical reflection on 'smart development', its measurement, possible 'drivers' and 'bottlenecks'. We first provide cross-national data on how much ecological footprint is used in the nations of the world system to 'deliver' a given amount of democracy,...

This empirical study about global Catholicism, based on the data of the World Values Survey and the European Social Survey, starts with a philosophical introduction by Christian Ghymers (Brussels) on the Roman Catholic Church and Enlightenment. The essence of Ghymers’ proposal to democratize...

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...

In this contribution, we look again at the trajectory and the efficiency of the ‘European social model’ (EMS). We re-apply an econometric methodology, which was already used in the study Herrmann, Heshmati et al., 2008, 2009. In that study, the authors said that apart from Finland and the...

Following the attempt by Alesina and Guiliano (2013) to measure global culture and to project these measurements onto real choropleth geographical world maps, we utilize the data from the World Values Survey (WVS) to arrive at robust measurement scales of global economic, political and social...

With the growing environmental crisis affecting our globe, ideas to weigh economic or social progress by the ‘energy input’ necessary to achieve it are increasingly gaining acceptance. This question is intriguing and is being dealt with by a growing number of studies, focusing on the...

Starting from Professor Kornai's assertion about the necessity to focus on the long-term perspectives of the transformation process, we analyze in this paper the Lisbon performance of the countries of the European Union from such a long-term, structural perspective. We present in a simple form...