This paper examines theoretically and empirically the extent to which the decisions by foreign firms to invest in a group of countries are influenced by economic factors, as opposed to political risk and institutional factors. We test our hypotheses on 35 European countries by means of panel...

We provide evidence indicating that countries with well-developed social security systems do not necessarily face a trade-off between social spending and competitiveness. On average, countries that spend a lot on social needs score well in the competitiveness league. We investigate the...