This paper looks at productivity growth rates in Malta and Cyprus and proposes policies as to how these island states countries might augment their productivity and competitiveness. We identify three possible growth strategies for the islands: an Innovation-Oriented Economy, a Controlled...

Financial crisis brought to the fore the fierce confrontation between Keynes disciples and Friedman disciples, between demand siders and supply siders, between Obama’s policies focused on economic growrh and EU austerity policies focused on deficit and debts reduction. Monetary policy...

Unemployment Accounts (UA) are mandatory individual saving accounts that can be used by governments as an alternative to the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system. I study a two tier UA-UI system where the unemployed withdraw from their unemployment account until it is exhausted and then receive...

Money can create jobs and thereby incomes for individual households, but money can equally destroy jobs and income. Added values can be created with the assets which are based on the savings levels -the net worth of individual households- but the "money managers": a government, a central bank,...

This chapter argues that, while much attention has been paid to developments in the financial sector as causes of the Great Recession, the ultimate cause of the crisis was, in fact, longer term trends in the real economy. Specifically, it is argued that the tendency for real wages to grow slower...

The Netherlands is almost a textbook-case of an open economy that is highly integrated in the world economy in terms of both financial flows and trade. Its current account has been persistently in surplus for over three decades and the surplus is one of the highest as in percentage of GDP of the...

The paper evaluates the fiscal policy initiatives during the Great Recession in the United States. It argues that, although the nonconventional fiscal policies targeted at the financial sector dwarfed the conventional countercyclical stabilization efforts directed toward the real sector, the...

The development of migration flows for the last decades and the emphasis laid on labour force circulation shifted the interest focus from managing crises generated by conjectural migration flows to inter-country cooperation for coordinating policies regarding labour migration.\\r\\nLabour...

Az adóztatás hatásának vizsgálata mind makroökonómiai és gazdaságpolitikai szempontból fontos feladat. Az egyes adónemek aránya országonként nagyon eltérő, és időben természetesen adott országon belül is változik. Más a jövedelmi adók, más az indirekt adók hatása. Nem...

In this paper we analyze the (potential) effects of labour market and fiscal policy reforms by heterogeneous European countries—Germany and France—on the domestic and foreign economy. We test the implications of the gains in matching efficiency and reduced unemployment benefits induced by...