Provincial governments in the Netherlands have only one general tax at their disposal. However, it has become an insufficient source of revenue for this level of government in the Dutch system. To increase the revenue raising capacity of the provincial governments, thirteen broad-based general...

Professional development and the continuous improvement of the public servants and auxiliary personnel competence in public institutions have become one of the main necessities in public institutions all over the area of the well-developed countries. In every country member of the European...

In the spectrum sections of its "Proposed Changes" to the Review of the European Union Regulatory Framework for Electronic Communications Networks and Services, the European Commission establishes a coherent, comprehensive and original set of forward-looking spectrum policy principles. By...

This paper offers a social accounting matrix (SAM) based analysis leading to a better understanding of the way various agents in the real economy interact, the way socio-economic groups make their living, the channels through which demand driven interventions may affect the poor, and the...

We propose a country classification of economic growth currency crisis consequences based on the entropic analysis of the real exchange rate. We show that this ranking is highly correlated with the annual minimum rate of growth, a proxy used to quantify real currency crisis effects.

We empirically explore the influence of loan characteristics, banking and financial structure, and regulatory and institutional factors on the design of 10,930 bank loan syndicates in emerging market economies from 1990 to 2006. Our results show that the structure of syndicates is adapted to...

The paper first investigates the causes of the recent financial and liquidity crisis in the US and all over the world as a preliminary phase of the imminent recession. It then questions Paulson-Bernanke’s plan as a solution to the crisis and ponders over the differences between EU plan and the...

This paper investigates the relative importance of shocks to total factor productivity (TFP) versus the marginal efficiency of investment (MEI) in explaining cyclical variations. The literature offers contrasting results: TFP shocks are important in neoclassical environments, while relatively...

In this paper we study mergers in two-sided industries. While mergers have been studied extensively in traditional industries, and there is a large and rapidly evolving literature on two-sided markets, there has been little work empirically examining mergers in these markets. We present a model...

The Portuguese National Action Plan for Employment (NAP) is the main instrument for the labour market policy. It was adopted in 1998. The NAP transposes to the Portuguese reality the contents of such guidelines, with the adequate adjustments required by the national specificities, establishing...