This report is a broad assessment of soil conditions in the pan-European region. It describes the degradation of soil, its relevance in the European and global contexts, and the links between soil and sustainable development. The report is mainly addressed to policy makers and the general public.

This report has been prepared in the framework of the EEA annual work programme, as part of the work plan of the former European Topic Centre on Soil. It contains a proposal for the establishment of a comprehensive framework for monitoring, assessing and reporting on soil conditions in Europe.

This report contains a summary of EEA work on the development of a European soil monitoring and assessment framework for soil since 1999. The framework is being designed as a basis for the work needed to support policy developments within the European Community as well as the EEA reporting...

Information on the national relevance and data availability of a proposed list of policy-relevant indicators on soil contamination from local and diffuse sources is provided in this report. It constitutes the final output of a working group on soil contamination indicators and analyses the...

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...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, for West Germany, France, Italy and US, we econometrically select within a SVAR model some fiscal policy regimes, i.e. a u0094set of rulesu0094 for the implementation of fiscal policies. Second, we identify the fiscal policy shocks related to different...

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...

This paper offers an alternative explanation for the behavior of postwar US inflation by measuring a novel source of monetary policy time-inconsistency due to Cukierman (2002). In the presence of asymmetric preferences, the monetary authorities end up generating a systematic inflation bias...

A number of authors have attemted to test whether the U.S. economy is in a determinate or an indeterminate equilibrium. We argue that to answer this question, one must be impose a priori restrictions on lag length that cannot be tested. We provide examples of two economic models. Model 1...