Phare support to SME development has mainly consisted of technical assistance and advisory services to national institutions, support to SME policy and legislative development and financial support for SME development. Progress has been made in tackling problems inherited from the past, as well...

This ex post evaluation addresses the EU/EC’s pre-accession assistance provided to the twelve countries that acceded to the European Union as part of the ‘fifth wave’ of EU enlargement, i.e. Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia...

For more than ten years, formerly centrally-planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have endeavoured to redress their environmental problems. For most CEE countries, the record of accomplishments is mixed. One of the least successful areas of reform has been cleanup and restoration...

This paper considers the education of the labour force based on an analysis of trends in and the relationships between job polarization and skills mismatch. Both job polarization and skills mismatch have become topics of increasing interest, but relationships between the two have been relatively...

Based on the review of literature and our own conceptual considerations, we show that absorption problems regarding the EU Structural Funds may be important. The central topic of our paper is the question of how to measure the administrative capacities of particular Candidate Countries for...