The collapse of the communist regime in Central and South-Eastern Europe gave way to sweeping economic and socio-political changes, marked by the conversion of centrally planned state economies into market economies, political liberalisation and democratisation, as well as to integration into...

Die EIoP ist ein referiertes, interdisziplinäres E-journal im Bereich der Forschung zur Europäischen Integration / Europaforschung. "Europäische Integration" ist dabei in einem weiten Sinne zu verstehen. Wissenschaftliche Beiträge aus allen relevanten Disziplinen, insbesondere aus den...

In this paper we propose a relatively simple procedure to predict Euro-zone industrial production using mostly data derived from the business surveys of the three major economies within the European Monetary Union (France, Germany, and Italy). The basic idea is that of estimating business...

This paper examines whether data from business tendency surveys are useful for forecasting the macro economy (GDP, unemployment, price and wage inflation, interest rates, exchange-rate changes etc.) in the short run. The starting point is a so-called dynamic factor model (DFM), which is used...

Since September 2004, Insee has published the results of its business survey in the services sector on a monthly basis together with a synthetic indicator. This indicator is extracted from both monthly and quarterly balances of opinion derived from the survey. The methodological framework is...

The global economy is in the midst of its deepest and most widespread recession since WW II. The euro-area economy has not been spared. It has been in recession since the second quarter of 2008 with the fall in real GDP accelerating to 2.5% quarter-on-quarter (q-o-q) by the first quarter of this...

This Economic Brief looks at past evidence as to what extent donors' economic cycles have an effect on their aid budgets. It generally finds only a weak correlation of economic growth and aid of OECD donors between 1971 and 2008, and aid was reduced in only about half of all episodes of deep or...

The present global financial crisis is the deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has impacted severely on the European economy. It has forced policy-makers in the EU and elsewhere to respond with exceptional measures to counter the depressive effects of the crisis. The crisis has...