The Committee points out that despite it promising opportunities, the on-going crisis means that ship owners and Ship Maintenance, Repair and Conversion (SMRC) shipyards are facing financing bottlenecks making business conditions difficult for companies and ever greater competition from third...

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 European Commission DG for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries invited a group of legal experts on the Mediterranean Sea for a meeting held in Brussels between the dates of 14-15 January 2009 to discuss in detail and to prepare a report based upon the following terms of reference: 1. Describe in...