In light of the profound changes that both the European economy and European politics have experienced since the global financial crisis of 2008, this policy paper intends to retrace the experience of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European (CESEE) countries with transition and catching-up...

After a long period in which state-led development was the dominant economic paradigm, since the 1980s private sector development has been the focus for economic policy makers. It is probably no coincidence that economic growth, stagnant for a few decades in much of the developing world, took...

The paper discusses the issue of labor force mobility in a broad sense, and analyses how changes in social security policy and the structure of the social safety net (SSN) affects different aspects of labor force mobility. The text is structured as follows: Introduction, then follows Chapter 2,...

The year 2000 was exceptionally good for the transition countries. The region as a whole expanded faster than the world economy average. However, the favourable external climate has started to deteriorate rapidly and especially the current pronounced weakening of the EU economy is worrying. The...

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) plans to introduce a single currency by 2010 in its six member states, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This paper focuses on selected macroeconomic and institutional issues and key policy choices which are likely to arise during the...

This paper examines diverse aspects of the monetary integration of the ten new Member States (NMS) which joined the EU on 1 May 2004 into the euro area. Most NMS have undergone a rapid and deep transformation in all areas with considerable progress in their processes of reform and convergence,...

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...

Global financial integration has been associated with divergent patterns of real convergence and the current account in emerging markets. While countries in emerging Asia have been running sizeable current account surpluses, countries in emerging Europe have been facing large current account...