Economic diversification has gained significant attention as a crucial factor for sustainable development worldwide. This paper addresses the risks associated with extreme specialisation and explores the potential benefits of economic diversification for Mongolia. By comparing Mongolia with its...

Long-term beneficial welfare state reforms not only face opposition from powerful insiders and beneficiaries of the system in place. While potential losers from a policy change are often relatively easy to spot, ewll-designed reforms generate mostly diffuse gains, and the potential winners are...

China is taking a more active role on the world stage, even more so since its rapid and strong recovery from the global recession. In the financial realm this expansion is underpinned by a strategy to build strong and competitive capital markets at home. In order to achieve this goal,...

The main strength of today’s international monetary system – its flexibility and adaptability to the different needs of its users – can also become its weakness, as it may contribute to unsustainable growth models and imbalances. The global financial crisis has shown that the system cannot...

Most firm-level research on the characteristics and strategies of globalized firms focuses on manufacturing industries while firm-level evidence on trade in services is still rare and has just recently begun to emerge. This study uses an unique dataset of Austrian service exporting firms over a...

European countries are currently faced with a variety of challenges, ranging from the new global distribution of economic activity, the diffusion of new, radical technologies to the aging of its population, youth unemployment and the aftermath of the economic and financial crisis. These...

The paper undertakes an empirical analytical assessment of some of the determinants of economic growth in the EU during the past decade, with a specific focus on the Central and Eastern European (CEE) members of the EU. The methodology is based on a combination of different statistical methods...

This paper analyses the speed and patterns of economic convergence in the new EU Member States of Central and Eastern Europe during transition and the first years of EU membership. After a brief discussion of measurement and data issues, the paper provides stylised facts on growth and...

This dissertation consists of five distinct empirical papers covering two large areas of research that are rather independent from each other: the economics of ageing and the economics of innovation. The first three chapters cover the impact of intergeneration interaction on the parents of adult...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...