The long and sustained expansion of the nineties has generated, especially in the US, widespread rumours about the "death of the cycle". Nevertheless, towards the end of the last decade, it became clear that fluctuations of economic activity were far from being extinct. This has contributed...

The "new industrial organisation" enshrined in game theory has elaborated important concepts, models and typologies that reveal the richness of corporate conduct. To some extent, these developments have improved the quality of analyses in European antitrust policy. Three illustrations are...

If the various data are combined, the only conclusion to be drawn is that the effects of the crisis and the social consequences of the economic downturn are largely related to the economic and social policies of a country's government. A review of the basic socioeconomic indicators for the...

While Latvia had one of the world’s fastest growth rates before the recession, it has lost about a quarter of its GDP since the recession hit. Although the economy is now growing at a good pace, the projections of the ministry for economic affairs suggest that, at best, it will not be able to...

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...