This article reviews beer production, consumption and the industrial organization of breweries throughout history. Monasteries were the centers of the beer economy in the early Middle Ages. Innovation and increased demand later induced the growth of commercial breweries. Globalization and...

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...

In this paper, we use recent robust non-parametric techniques in the European retail sector. By means of a database of firms in the European retail sector (four-digit NACE 5211) in five European countries over the period 1998–2006, we apply data envelopment analysis and compare the analysis...