Why do some countries join the EU earlier than others, why do others wait? Inorder to answer this question we apply the theory of investment under uncertainty (Dixit andPindyck, 1994) to the decision on EU-membership. We develop a simplified model of twoperiods to study how the value of waiting...

The European integration process has removed barriers to trade within Europe. We analyze which integration step has most profoundly influenced the trending behavior of export openness. We endogenously determine the single most decisive break in the trend, account for strong cross-country...

The European Union (EU) failed repeatedly to hold Greece accountable for violations of the Treaties it signed over the past five decades. In particular, the EU not only did not express reservations in the face of these violations, but on two crucial occasions, in 1979 and again in 2000, it even...

New Public Management (NPM) is considered as a global paradigm emerging in response to economic, institutional, political, and ideological changes.Many attempts to define the New Public Management have been made and there are several definitions of this notion, referring to the implementation of...

After almost a quarter of a century since the fall of the Berlin wall, Germany has undoubtedly become the uncontested nerve-centre of the European Union (EU) in both economic and political terms, evolving not only as Europe’s most important economic power, but also as its de facto leader in...

In the perspective of adhesion to the European Union, Romania has to make huge efforts, to produce, to innovate, to study, to develop the higher educational system, to find those niches where it can become competitive at the international level. To be competitive at the beginning at the XXI-st...