Williamson (1965) argued that catching up countries experiencing strong national growth tend also to see a widening in regional disparities, whereas in more developed economies strong national growth and falling regional disparities could go hand in hand. We find some evidence of a trade-off...

The authors revisit Western Europe's record with labor-productivity convergence and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and...

Economic performance in developed economies diverged in the nineties, with some countries enjoying high growth in output and accelerating growth in productivity. Ireland excelled in many respects and some Nordic European countries recovered from a serious crisis and successfully regained strong...

This paper analyses the effects of previous enlargements of the European Union on the regional structure of production. Focusing on regional development five years before and seven years after integration, we find relatively small and heterogeneous effects. For the addition of Greece a robust...

Austerity measures alone will not suffice to generate the growth needed for recovery in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy. A European Recovery Programme is necessary to stimulate growth through structural reforms and fiscal stimulus. This contribution describes policy areas where non-fiscal...

Im Jahr 2000 konnte das hohe Wachstumstempo des Vorjahres nur noch im ersten Quartal gehalten werden. Die reale Bruttoinlandsproduktion expandierte aber dank des hohen Überhangs zu Jahresbeginn noch um 4,1 %. Die Lage auf dem Arbeitsmarkt verbesserte sich weiter. Die Arbeitslosenquote ging im...

Nowadays many developing countries focus on economic policies for promoting international tourism and exports expansion as a potential source of economic growth of the country. However, the understanding of the relationship between exports and economic growth is still ongoing. When treating the...

We present a medium-scale dynamic factor model to estimate and forecast the rate of growth of the Spanish economy in the very short term. The intermediate size of the model overcomes the serious specification problems associated with large scale-models and the implicit loss of information of...