Starting from Professor Kornai´s assertion about the necessity to focus on the long-termperspectives of the transformation process, we analyze in this paper the Lisbon performanceof the countries of the European Union from such a long-term, structural perspective. Wepresent in a simple form the...

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...

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 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...

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...

In this qualitative sociological and quantitative economic policy paper, we show the trade-off between social expenditures and absolute poverty, and construct a non-parametric efficiency indicator, combining the residuals from the trade-off between social expenditures per capita and absolute...

In this qualitative sociological and quantitative economic policy paper, we start out from the assumption of a very recent European Commission Background paper on the "Efficiency and effectiveness of social spending", which says the effectiveness of social spending can be defined by the degree...

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...

In this qualitative sociological and quantitative economic policy paper, we start out from the assumption of a very recent European Commission Background paper on the Efficiency and effectiveness of social spending, which says the effectiveness of social spending can be defined by the degree to...

This article reflects the renewed interest of economics and the social science discipline in value systems and religion. The World Values Survey provided a data framework of global value change, whose quantitative results led Barro (2004) to analyze the connections between some dimensions of...