Starting from Professor Kornai's assertion about the necessity to focus on the long-term perspectives of the transformation process, we analyze in this paper the Lisbon performance of the countries of the European Union from such a long-term, structural perspective. We present in a simple form...

This paper establishes eight stylized facts on the evolution of the localization of economic activity across industries and regions in the EU-15 since 1980. Localization, which nests concentration and specialization, is measured by a Theil index. The stylized facts reveal a broad aggregate trend...

The economic integration process requires appropriate understanding of the degree of vulnerability of member states to various kinds of shocks as well as identification of appropriate measures to mitigate the impact of these shocks on macroeconomic performance. Consequently, this study seeks to...

In this paper we put to test the impact of the European Structural Funds on the economies of the 20 Italian administrative regions for the 1989-2006 period. The main elements of novelty are that the empirical analysis is carried out by considering separately four sectors (agriculture, energy and...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the transition of economic freedom indexes themselves among countries in the world instead of their economic effect. The three central questions of this study are: Do economic freedom sub-indexes converge? Do some sub-indexes of economic freedom display...

The dynamic response of aggregate variables to shocks is one of the central concerns of applied macroeconomics. The main measurement procedure for these dynamics consists of estimating an ARMA or VAR (VARs, for short). In non- or semi-structural approaches, the characterization of dynamics stops...

Measurable aspects of the economic convergence of EU countries form the main topic of this paper. For this purpose, statistical and econometric methods are presented and applied for revealing characteristic elements of such a process. A first group of methods refers mainly to aspects such as:...

Unit root in output, an exponential 2% rate of convergence and no change in the underlying dynamics of output seem to be three stylized facts that cannot go together. This paper extends the Solow-Swan growth model allowing for cross-sectional heterogeneity. We show both theoretically, with an...

Unit roots in output, an exponential 2% rate of convergence and no change in the underlying dynamics of output seem to be three stylized facts that cannot go together. This paper extends the Solow-Swan growth model allowing for cross-sectional heterogeneity. In this framework, aggregate shocks...