The EU's post-Communist countries as well as the EU in general are participating in the implementation of the Lisbon Strategy which aims to create an economy of knowledge. The usage of catching up is extremely important in achieving this strategy's goals. Unfortunately, the EU's post-Communist...

Gravity factors explain a large part of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows in transition economies, including in Southeastern Europe—a region not comprehensively covered before in econometric studies—but host country policies also matter. Key are policies that affect unit labor costs,...

With the help of the concept of linkage and leverage, this paper aims at exploring how the relative influence of international actors (namely the European Union (EU) and Russia) can explain the persistence of the authoritarian regime in Belarus. The findings suggest that in the background of the...

When welfare is analysed in Sweden the analysis is usually made at the national level; when the analysis is not done on the national level, the local level is in focus to illuminate differences between municipalities. Studies on poverty are no exception. The regional level contains a lot of...

This paper provides the quantitative estimate of the potential growth bonus for CIS countries, and in particular EU's Easter Neighbours, that can be a result of deeper institutional harmonisation with the EU. Econometric investigation involving instrumental variable, simultaneous equation and...

This paper examines the impact of EU enlargement on agro-food export performance across 12 new EU member states and 5 newly independent states in the EU markets covering the period 1999-2007. The performance is examined by duration of export and hazard model. We find larger duration for the...

We analyze four interrelated aspects of economic convergence and their linkages over the period 1999-2013, drawing on the experiences of 26 member states of the European Union, with special focus on the ten Central and East-European new members (the EU10). These aspects are (1) real economic,...