Unemployment rates as well as income per capita differ vastly across the regions of Europe. Labour mobility can play a role in resolving regional disparities. This paper focuses on the questions why labour mobility is low in the EU and how it is possible that it remains low. We explore whether...

The European Commission is currently drafting a proposal for a review of the EU budget, which could lead to its most significant reform to date. This paper proposes a method for restructuring the EU budget, based on a multidisciplinary approach. The insights of public sector economics, fiscal...

The issue of What the EU Should Do, or what should be the competences of the European Union, is gaining more relevance with the increasing level of EU integration. The academic analysis on the competences of the EU has so far not fully answered this question. The political science literature has...

The CAP reforms that the EU accepted in June 2003 will partially decouple direct income payments to farmers from production and make these payments conditional on cross-compliance. The reforms are driven by enlargement of EU membership, budgetary constraints, mounting pressures from diverse...

Structural funds are the most intensively used policy instrument by the European Union to promote economic growth in its member states and to speed up the process of convergence. This paper empirically explores the effectiveness of European Structural Funds by means of a panel data analysis for...

This paper tests the question whether the integration process in the EU has contributed to the often-observed growing dispersion of income over the regions of the EU, in the presence of convergence between the member states. We do this by introducing price convergence as an indicator of...