The EU emerged from recession in the third quarter of 2009 but growth remains anaemic ( 0.3%, EU27) and well below trend rates. Unemployment notably continues to rise and its pace of increase has accelerated in the most recent quarter to reach the highest levels in over a decade (9.5%, EU27)....

This paper develops a model with multiple steady states (low tax and unemployment rate versus high tax and unemployment rate) in which equilibrium selection is not conditioned on a sunspot variable. Instead, large enough shocks initiate unavoidable transitions from one regime to the other. The...

We quantify the degree of persistence in unemployment rates of transition countries using a variety of methods benchmarked against the EU. In part of the paper, we work with the concept of linear u0093Hysteresisu0094 as described by the presence of unit roots in unemployment. Since this is...

On the face of it, Austria’s labour market performs very well, which is reflected in one of the lowest unemployment rates in the EU. However, while many of the euro area members have recently succeeded in reducing unemployment, the Austrian jobless rate has been on a clearly rising path since...

In the recent debate on the response to the challenges of globalisation, the so-called Nordic model has received much praise. While the three Nordic countries are often lumped together, their performance has not been the same. A notable feature of the Finnish economy compared with that of Sweden...

This fourth issue for 2007 includes: a summary of current macroeconomic trends and prospects; an overview of the ERM statistics for the fourth quarter of 2007; details of the global restructuring plan at Unilever; restructuring at ZRE Katowice and more on restructuring in Cyprus.