Over the past century, most industrialized countries have adopted public pension systems based pay-as-you-go system, according to which the actual contributors pay the pensions of the actual pensioners, with the expectation that future taxpayers pay their pensions when they retire. The evolution...

Composite indicators are very popular, despite being affected by several problems that often result in lack of robustness of the rankings involved. The aim of this paper is to show that composite indicators can be safely used, provided that rankings are built via uncertainty analysis rather than...

The authors revisit Western Europe’s record with labor–productivity convergence and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation...

To qualify for European Monetary Union (EMU) countries must meet convergence criteria established in the Maastricht treaty of December 1991. However, an analysis of how difficult it will be to meet the convergence criteria is not sufficient to identify the countries most likely to join EMU in...

This paper examines the choice of exchange rate regime in EU candidate countries during the process of accession to the European Monetary Union (EMU). In the presence of real exchange rate appreciation due to the Balassa-Samuelson effect, candidate countries face a trade-off between trend...

We study the cross-sectional correlations of net, total, and disaggregated capital flows for the major source and recipient European Union countries. We seek evidence of changes in these correlations since the introduction of the euro to understand whether the European Union can be considered a...