This article investigates the determination of 14 indicators of development in 109 countries with complete data. The empirical record, presented in this essay, speaks a clear language in favor of Islamic democracy and against those in the West that attempt to treat Islamic cultural heritage as a...

The publication surveys the major existing evidence from EUROSTAT and UN/World Bank sources and comes to the depressing conclusion that there is practically no real convergence of social conditions in Europe over the last years. Instead, the gaps between East and West, and between South and...

Starting from Professor Kornai's assertion about the necessity to focus on the long-term perspectives of the transformation process, we analyze in this paper the Lisbon performance of the countries of the European Union from such a long-term, structural perspective. We present in a simple form...

In this qualitative sociological and quantitative economic policy paper, we start out from the assumption of a very recent European Commission Background paper on the "Efficiency and effectiveness of social spending", which says the effectiveness of social spending can be defined by the degree...