The 1990s witnessed some important shifts in the underlying growth performances of the EU and US economies, with a significant gap opening up in terms of GDP, and more importantly, GDP per capita, growth rates. From a situation over the period 1980-1995 when EU and US living standards were...

The EU KLEMS project represents a unique collective effort on behalf of academics, statisticians and policy makers to provide fundamental policy insights into the changes which have occurred at the industry level in Europe, the US and Japan over recent decades. The present paper has focussed on...

This paper presents the results of long run labour productivity and GDP growth rate projections (until 2050) for each of the 25 EU Member States and provides a detailed overview of the forecast methodology used. These projections were undertaken in order to provide an internationally comparable...

Globalisation, defined as an increasingly integrated world economy, has the potential to generate the largest structural upheaval in economies since the industrial revolution. As in the past, this process is being underpinned by both technological change and by a shift in policies in many...

This paper uses the EU KLEMS industry growth accounting database to explore the determinants of the EU-US total factor productivity (TFP) growth gap which started to emerge in the mid-1990's.

In recent years a new consensus has emerged in macroeconomics in general and in model building in particular, the so called New Keynesian Paradigm (NKM).This paper applies Bayesian estimation techniques to a time series data set of the euro area and presents estimates of a DSGE model. The...

The implications of ageing populations over the coming decades at the global level will be significant in terms of not only a slowdown in the growth rate of output and living standards but also with regard to fiscal and financial market trends. Given the backdrop of the downward trend in...

This paper on European Union (EU) pension reform provides an overview of the debate and, on the basis of a series of model simulations, makes an empirical assessment of the main pension policy reform options at the EU, not the Member State, level. It estimates what it would take to bring the...

The structural nature of the EU's productivity downturn is confirmed by the analysis in this paper, with the bulk of the deterioration emanating from an outdated and inflexible industrial structure which has been slow to adapt to the intensifying pressures of globalisation and rapid...

This paper describes the methodology for calculating potential growth and output gaps using a production function approach. On the basis of the Commission services Spring 2002 economic forecasts, the approach is illustrated by providing estimates for the EU's Member States, the Euro Zone and...