After the switch to a floating exchange rate in 1973, the Swiss National Bank at first adopted annual monetary targets and in the 1990s shifted to a medium-term targeting strategy. In this paper I review the SNBu0092s internal policy analysis, an aspect of Swiss monetary targeting that has...

With the development towards comprehensive and more sophisticated border control regimes, the problem of protection seekers’ access to EU territory has increasingly come into focus. Disorderly movement is presently the main avenue to safety in the EU, and human smugglers act as important...

Since 1995 Germany has barely managed to grow by 1.2% annually, with growth over the last four years averaging only 0.6%. In 2005, growth will again be below1%. With these low growth rates Germany has clearly fallen behind all the other European countries. The German economy is suffering from a...

While there has been some recovery since the depths of the Great Recession in 2009, both output and employment levels remain lower than they were pre-crisis in the EU-27. Indeed, the severity of the recession has been such that output has yet to return to 2007 levels in each of the largest...

This paper presents evidence for structural differences in economic growth dynamics between the current EU and the central- and eastern European accession countries. Two important results emerge from the analysis. First, accession countries have posted higher average growth and wider output...