Ever since the path-breaking empirical studies by Schott (1998) world systems scholars start from the well-established assumption that world science is a single gigantic center-periphery relationship. The strategic and tactical practical conclusions for individual scholars and their agenda in...

This empirical study about global Catholicism, based on the data of the World Values Survey and the European Social Survey, starts with a philosophical introduction by Christian Ghymers (Brussels) on the Roman Catholic Church and Enlightenment. The essence of Ghymers’ proposal to democratize...

For many years, EU-27-Europe’s political-economic strategy was characterized by an intensive opening to the forces of globalization and the realization of the ‘four freedoms’ of goods, capital, labour and services on the EU-27-European ‘internal market’. The present article is a 175...

For some years now, the Happy Planet Organization presents the so-called ‘Happy Planet Index’ (HPI), which is an index of measuring the trade-off between ecological footprint data and life quality (Happy Life Years, HLYE). Costa Rica emerges from these comparisons as the world’s ‘best...

This article looks at the long-term, structural determinants of environmental performance in the world system. In multiple standard OLS regression models, we test the effects of 26 standard predictor variables, including the ‘four freedoms’ of goods, capital, labour and services, on the...

In this contribution, we look again at the trajectory and the efficiency of the ‘European social model’ (EMS). We re-apply an econometric methodology, which was already used in the study Herrmann, Heshmati et al., 2008, 2009. In that study, the authors said that apart from Finland and the...

This article reflects the renewed interest of economics and the social science discipline in value systems and religion. The World Values Survey provided a data framework of global value change, whose quantitative results led Barro (2004) to analyze the connections between some dimensions of...

This article attempts to develop a perspective for radical reform of the Austrian and European universities. The article takes up anew a simple idea, already presented in an article in the widely circulated European political magazine “Die Zukunft” (Vienna) in 1991, proposing full University...

The present article presents at first a German language summary about recent quantitative studies by the author and his associates about global development since the end of Communism in up to 175 nations of the world, using 26 predictor variables to evaluate the determinants of 30 processes of...

Globalization and monopolies lead towards stagnation. Paul Boccara emphasized this since the early 1970s. Some other great political economists of the instability of the international order, like Rosa Luxemburg and Otto Bauer, foresaw the dark clouds of major inner-capitalist wars on the...