EU enlargement has increased the diversity of the European Union in a substantial way, in particular with respect to its capacities in the fields of science, technology and innovation (STI). The shares of both gross and business sector expenditures on R&D in GDP are increasingly diverging...

Advanced industrial countries have been exhibiting a steady decline of the labour income shares in the last two decades. The study explains this phenomenon by resorting to the old Stolper-Samuelson theorem. The conclusions concerning the impact of free trade on the income distribution are...

The European Union has developed a complex strategy and policy coordination process to promote gender equality in all community policies through "gender mainstreaming". While every member country has to promote the policy objective of gender equality, the instruments implemented to that end may...

We characterise regional labour market problems in the EU 27 using disaggregate data on regional employment, unemployment and participation rates, by gender and 10-year age groups at the NUTS-2 level. We ask whether accession changed disparities in regional labour market conditions and to what...

Low growth and persistently high unemployment in Europe raised the question whether it was the specific features of the European Social Model, which lead to these disappointing results. This paper defines the characteristics of the model, and the differences between submodels applied in...

The European Employment Strategy (EES) has been put in place in order to ensure the survival of the European Social Model in view of institutional change resulting from the introduction of the European Monetary System. It has become the platform of a method of open coordination of social and...

The current paper analyses the similarities between the Bretton Woods system (BWS) and the Eurozone and looks into the future of the world monetary system. The gold standard, the Keynes Plan and the White Plan are identified as the most important sources of ideas that formed the BWS. Although...

Based on a sample of 1,084 European regions (EU 15) over the period of 1995-2004, we estimate the determinants of regional growth of GDP per capita, allowing for both spatial lag and spatial error dependence. We find that robust LM tests cannot reject the null hypothesis of no spatial dependence...

Direct payments are the most important expenditure of the Common Agricultural Policy. They are mostly in the form of decoupled direct payments which are intended to be allocatively neutral. Increasing volumes of such transfers imply that distributive aspects of CAP expenditures become more...

This working paper examines whether the EU countries are in a race-to-the-bottom competition with regard to their corporate taxes. An empirical model is used to determine whether such a race is actually on, i.e., whether states reduce their taxation of capital income in response to increasing...