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...

When the source of external capital for Continental European firms is examined, debt markets have historically supplied a much larger percentage of the external capital than equity markets, and firms rely much more on bank debt than bonds for their external funds. In this environment banks have...

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...

The compensation hypothesis predicts a positive causation from international economic openness to the size of the public sector, as governments step in to perform a risk mitigating role to counterbalance the increasing exposure to external risk and the economic dislocations caused by growing...

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...