The European welfare regimes face two sets of challenges. One internal, specific for the welfare state itself, and the other external, imposed by changing economic, political and economics conditions. The first challenge lies in the growing gap between the rigid welfare state design and flexible...

This article analyses the relationship between the main antecedents of and imports/GNP ratio as a subtle reflector of macro-level consumer ethnocentrism (CE). We constructed a model that reflects the macro level ethnocentrism in a domestic country. This ratio expresses the economy openness of a...

Since the WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) came into force, Members have invested considerable efforts in adopting and promoting the use of measures intended to reduce conformity assessment (CA) related barriers to trade. Our knowledge of the impact of specific trade...

During the last decades, international trade flows of the industrialised countries became more and more intra-industry. At the same time, employment perspectives particularly of the low skilled by tendency deteriorated in these countries. This phenomenon is often traced back to the fact that...

We examine some controversial country-specific factors influencing vertical and horizontal intra-industry trade including foreign direct investment and income distributions. As concerns, the effect of differences in countries’ levels of economic development (richness), both theories and...

The principal goal of integration in Europe in the post-Second World War period has always been the safeguarding of peace through economic integration. The European Union (EU) has overseen splendid economic achievements. A sign of that great success has been the EU’s continuous enlargement....

Credit rating agencies play a critical role in financial markets; by rating the creditworthiness of a wide range of borrowers - from corporations to sovereigns - these agencies add liquidity to markets that would otherwise be illiquid, promote efficiency within such markets, and perhaps most...

The main aim of this article is to analyze the effects of industrial and trade policy of the European Union on economic development, with particular reference to the negative effects of excessive trade deficits and industrial decline in some EU countries in the period 2000-2010. We compare 5...

The world-wide move of Reform of Universities encounters a special echo in France, where there are some who reproach its challenging the French social model. This latter is based on a strict separation between the business world and the access system to basic rights, that are symbolized by the...

Whatever its successes and difficulties, monetary integration has caused significant changes in many, perhaps most, Eurozone societies. A review of EMU's origins and first years of EMU would thus be remiss without national case studies. France is a particularly good choice for this task. It has...