We compare three EU countries that have recently experienced substantial but very different reforms of their family support systems: Austria, Spain and the UK. The structure of these systems is different: Austria emphases universal benefits, Spain tax concessions and the UK means-tested...

Many macroeconometric models depict situations where the shares of the major demand aggregates in output are stable over time. The joint dynamic behavior of the considered demand aggregate and output may thus be approximated by a cointegrated vector autoregression. However, the shares of many...

In this paper we challenge the traditional labour market view, which argues that unemployment is determined in the long-term by its equilibrium rate, which in turn is affected by permanent shocks of some exogenous variables. In our empirical approach we decompose the dynamics of employment and...

The main characteristic of the implementation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) is the transition from various national currencies to the Euro, the common European currency. A final fixing of the individual bilateral exchange rates of all European countries involved in the Monetary Union...

In this paper, we present the basic ideas, the design and some key results of an ongoing research project on the transformation of the national political space in Western Europe. We start from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationaliza-tion leads to the formation...

This paper analyses the revealed comparative advantage for six European countries: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK. The results can be summarized as the follows: Italy always had a trade specialisation index which was well above average. Apart from Italy, whose trade...