Austria's EU accession 25 years ago, alongside Finland and Sweden, was preceded by an extended period of convergence toward the EU: via the free trade agreement concluded with the EC in 1973, and the participation in the European Economic Area (EEA) in 1994. Although the COVID-19 crisis in 2020...

We analyse the role of foreign direct investment in the new acceding economies. The question to be answered is whether the new countries in EU may improve their positions in order to capture FDI flows from their comparative advantages and the southern European countries can worse their positions...

In this paper we assess the possibility of producing unbiased forecasts for fiscal variables in the euro area by comparing a set of procedures that rely on different information sets and econometric techniques. In particular, we consider ARMA models, VARs, small scale semi-structural models at...

Unit labour costs (ULCs) are one of the key economic variables considered in the context of globalization, competitiveness and production-location decisions. With the EU accession of eight Central and East European countries and their (almost) full inclusion in the European Single Market, the...

This study analyses the impact of economic catching-up on annual inflation rates in the European Union with a special focus on the new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using an array of estimation methods, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect is not an important driver of...

This paper deals with the question of what impact membership of the European Monetary Union (EMU) has had on small European states. We will also analyze whether or to what extent a large number of small member states affect the EMU itself when they vastly outnumber the large countries. We...