This paper analyses whether the severe demographic change in Germany causes its high current account surpluses. An ageing population both increases the supply and lowers demand of capital in an economy. Due to a longer life span individuals save more. Fewer workers reduce the optimal capital...

We study the impact of fiscal rules on macroeconomic performance following natural disaster shocks, using dynamic panel models and quarterly data for 89 countries. We find that countries with fiscal rules perform significantly better in the aftermath of such shocks than countries without rules....

Early, the convergence theory was suggestively expressed in the Solow model. This can be shown in line with the fact that while economic development is advancing (expressed by the income per capita growth), on long run there is a general convergence process among countries. Generally, empirical...

Coming from standard economic growth theory and empirical evidences, we concentrated on the convergence process as a result of structural changes in economy. We investigate the differences among countries in EU in terms of the share in total economy of main sectors. Then, based on the spatial...

The development of employment and unemployment in regional labour markets is known to spatially interdependent. Global Vector-Autoregressive (GVAR) models generate a link between the local and the surrounding labour markets and thus might be useful when analysing and forecasting employment and...

Certainly the current crisis is affecting seriously the convergence process in EU. Starting from the spatial distribution in EU of some fundamental development indicators before the current crisis, we try to estimate the impact of the prolonged crisis. During last years, the less developed...

This paper focuses on the empirically observed relationship between demographic change and inflation and explores the theoretical nature of the puzzling link between the two. It puts the existent disparate empirical findings in the literature into perspective by formalizing an...

In the recent past, interest of Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) policies to influence the innovation behaviour of firms has been increased considerably. This gives rise to the notion of behavioural additionality, broadening traditional evaluation concepts of input and output...

Crime risk perception is known to be an important determinant of individuals' well being. Therefore, it is crucial, especially for governments, to understand its determinants and those (public) policies that can reduce it. Among those polices, resources devoted to police forces emerge as a key...

This paper provides a contribution to the debate on the role of EU cohesion policy in Italy. The focus is on the territorial effects of EU spending from 1996 to 2007. The empirical analysis considers a neoclassical growth model which is augmented by the structural funds spent by each region....