The article shows that reservations in Europe against Turkey's future membership are really groundless. A Muslim nation already was a member of the EU: Algeria. When Algeria was still a colony, it joined the EU (then: European Economic Community) on January 1st 1958 as a French "Departement",...

We investigate the convergence process among EU regions between 1980-2002 taking into account the effects of spatial heterogeneity and spatial spillover effects. The spatial regimes model allows for different steady-state growth paths. In contrast to previous analyses, the regimes in this paper...

This paper investigates whether joint economic and political integration leads to larger economic benefits than just economic integration. The identification strategy rests on the fact that Norway, at the time of the 1995 Enlargement of the European Union (EU), had successfully completed...

We introduce the notion of language disenfranchisement which arises if the number of EU working languages is reduced. We use the data on language proficiency in EU and show that, in spite of the widespread knowledge of English, the retention of French and German as working languages in essential...

In this paper we conduct a meta-analysis to examine the link between R&D spending and economic growth in the EU and other regions. The results suggest that the growth-enhancing effect of R&D in the EU15 countries does not differ from that in other countries in general, but it is less significant...

This paper adds to the scarce cross-country evidence on FDI location decisions between the EU-15 Member States and the ten new Members that joined the European Union (EU) in 2004 and 2007 from the Central and East European Countries (CEECs). To capture the discrete nature of the location choice,...

This paper analyzes the role of labor market institutions in explaining developments of shadow economies in European countries. We use several alternative measures of the shadow sector, and we examine effects of labor institutions on shadow sector in two specific regions: new and old European...

The paper presents an analysis of real income convergence between the 11 countries of Central Eastern Europe which have joined the European Union (EU11) and 15 countries of Western Europe (EU15) in the period 1993-2015. The evolution of the income gap between the two groups of countries in terms...

The aim of this chapter is to assess changes in the competitiveness of the Polish economy from 2010 to 2015. The analysis covers the basic indicators of economic development, such as GDP growth, inflation, unemployment, balance of public finances, and current account balance. Poland’s economic...

Between 2003 and 2008 productivity patterns diverged between the fast growing, newest members of the European Union and the slower paced, elder ones – as would be expected. However, there are also striking divergences within the latter group, with productivity in Southern Europe going into...