Policy frameworks of the IMF, the World Bank, and the EU are discussed in order to come up with criteria of macroeconomic and financial stability and sustainability for Future Member States of the EU (candidate and potential candidate countries). The key deficiency of the EU policy framework is...

E-commerce has become more prevalent throughout Europe in the last decade. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic accelerated this trend, particularly in the retail sector. This paper focuses on the implications of increasing business-to-consumer ecommerce for prices and inflation in the euro area....

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic caused a deep recession globally, as well as in the euro area, accompanied by a steep decline in inflation rates in 2020. This paper reviews some of the main challenges created by the pandemic for inflation measurement and provides micro price data analysis of...

This report documents a blockchain application developed for the energy sector that enables distributed market coordination for decentralized energy systems. As its core element, it utilizes Ethereum-based smart contracts to facilitate market matching between individual producers and consumers...

This report documents a blockchain application developed for the real estate sector. The application enables distributed workflow management in a complicated transaction process: the selling of a share of stocks in a housing corporation. As its core element, the application utilizes...

Part 1 of the report provides an overview of the position of energy-intensive industries in Romania as compared to other Central and East European economies. The industries identified as particularly 'energy-intensive' are the paper industry, the chemical, the non-metallic mineral products and...

Several years after the global slump, the construction industry and many countries and sectors with construction-related activities and firms tied to them still feel the impact of that financial and economic crisis. In contrast, several years prior to the crisis, there had been a major...

Die deutsche Autoindustrie kann auf ein goldenes Jahrzehnt zurückblicken. Zwischen den Jahren 2008 und 2018 erzielten die Unternehmen einen Absatzrekord nach dem anderen. Der Haupttreiber dieser Entwicklung war das starke Wachstum des chinesischen Marktes, von dem die deutschen Hersteller und...

The effects of travel bans, and the disruption of production and shipping due to COVID-19 quickly rippled through global production and supply chains, even when the virus SARS-CoV-2 was still contained within East Asia. The global spread of the virus resulted in export restrictions on goods...

Die klimaneutrale Transformation der Wirtschaft stellt die energieintensive Grundstoffindustrie in Nordrhein-Westfalen vor große Herausforderungen. Gleichzeitig bieten sich in der Entwicklung grüner Grundstoffe und Produktionsprozesse auch vielversprechende Potenziale, die NRW zum...