This paper analyses the structure of Greek exports and presents policy recommendations to boost export performance. Despite recent improvements, export performance deteriorated in the last decade particularly in the service sector. The decline in unit labour costs since the beginning of the...

GDP per capita in Lithuania rose from one third to two thirds of the OECD average level between 1995 and 2014, despite internal and external crises. Productivity catch-up was critical to this process, although the level of labour productivity also remains around one-third below the OECD average....

We analyse the effect of Slovakia’s euro adoption in 2009 on the country’s economic performance by using the synthetic control method. This method compares Slovakia’s economic performance with that of a weighted combination of comparable Central European economies that have remained...

This paper explores the relationship between policy settings and extreme positive and negative growth events, what we call GDP tail risks, using quantile regression methods. Conditioning on several country characteristics such as the size, stage of development and openness to trade as well as...

Certain growth-promoting policies can have negative side-effects by increasing the vulnerability of economies to financial crises. Typical examples are greater openness to financial flows or more liberalised financial markets. This paper investigates whether the growth benefits of policy reforms...

Despite Greece’s long history as a trading nation, the country is failing to live up to its export potential. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) could significantly contribute to strengthening Greece’s export performance, thereby helping to jump-start economic growth and job creation...

Against the background of increasing competition and other significant structural changes implied by globalisation, maintaining and enhancing competitiveness has evolved into one of the prime concerns in most countries. Following up on previous work (see in particular ECB Occasional Papers No....

The EU candidate and potential candidate countries have made considerable progress in economic transition and integration into the world economy within less than two decades. Nevertheless, gaps in terms of income per capita relative to the euro area remain large. This suggests that the...

Portugal’s export performance over the past decade has been impressive, helping to reduce external imbalances. This partly owed to a sequence of structural reforms that benefited the productivity of the export sector and led to an increase in its size. Nonetheless, exports as a share of GDP...

Estonia is highly integrated into the global trade system: it exports approximately 80% of GDP and around half of domestic employment is sustained by foreign demand. Given that international trade and foreign direct investment are considered as major channels of technology diffusion and...