This note presents employment policies aimed at containing the impact of the crisis on labour markets and assesses the effectiveness of these measures against a set of policy "do's and don'ts" and addresses the question whether further action is warranted.The global downturn is now strongly...

The shock waves from the U.S. subprime crisis have intensified throughout the last two years and have by now reached almost all economies. The Commission economic forecasts clearly indicated that in Europe the recession would be the deepest since the foundation of the EU. The 2009 Brussels...

The ongoing financial and economic crisis is taking its toll through an unprecedented drop in GDP – the Commission's spring forecast sets this loss at around 4% in 2009. Whilst financial market turbulence, credit shortages and higher unemployment will inevitably lead to a non-negligible loss...

Europe has begun to emerge from the prolonged slump caused by the global financial crisis in 2008 and exacerbated by the euro zone single-currency crisis in 2010–2011. In the last year, aggregate employment levels have risen faster than at any time since 2008. This, the fourth annual European...

This report describes the findings of a study of change in job tenure between 2002 and 2012 in the EU. The study examined change in mean tenure as well as the distribution of short and long tenure in the EU and in individual Member States. It also looked at differences in tenure according to...

Within a two-step GARCH framework we explore the linkages between equity returns of ten sectors in the euro area, the United States and Japan, respectively. Our estimation framework allows a distinction to be made between spillover effects originating from one of the three currency areas and...

There has been much discussion of the differences in macroeconomic performance and prospects between the US, Japan and the euro area. Using Markov-switching techniques, in this paper we identify and compare specifically their major business-cycle features and examine the case for a common...