During the last decade, economists have intensively searched for evidence on the importance of the Balassa-Samuelson (B-S) hypothesis in explaining nominal convergence. One general result is that B-S can at best explain only part of the excess inflation observed in the European catching-up...

The creation of the European Central Bank and the Euro have brought new challenges to EU integration and economic policy. This book looks into issues ofmonetary and factor market policies. The analysis also presents new theoretical and empirical research on the - transitory - decline of the...