The publication surveys the major existing evidence from EUROSTAT and UN/World Bank sources and comes to the depressing conclusion that there is practically no real convergence of social conditions in Europe over the last years. Instead, the gaps between East and West, and between South and...

This article first investigates the determination of 14 indicators of development in 109 countries with complete data based on MNC penetration on development in the 1990s and beyond, with such 'new' indicators as 'Islamic culture' or 'adherence to the Washington consensus'. A consequence of the...

One of the most famous pieces of Latin American scholarship, the article Sunkel, Osvaldo 1973 "Transnational capitalism and national disintegration in Latin America." Social and. Economic Studies 22 (1): 156-171, published originally in 1969 and having appeared in many translations and editions...

In this article, we draw some optimistic, socio-liberal conclusions about Islam in the world system. Countering some alarmist voices in the West, neither migration nor Muslim culture are to be blamed for the contemporary crisis, but the very nature of unequal capitalist accumulation and...

The article analyses further develops the neo-dependency approach already presented by the same author and looks at recent time series trends in the structure of international capital penetration, international savings, and the dynamics of unequal transfer and their effects on social well-being...

While there is a never-ending debate on Islamism, Islamist terrorism and the identity of Europe vis-à-vis growing Muslim communities in Europe, there are hardly any solid cross-national data being presented on the real extent of the Islamist threat facing Europe, and on the social conditions...

The European Union's center-piece of economic policy making is the Lisbon process, which tries to make Europe the most competitive economic region in the world economy by 2010. EU-Commission President Jose Manuel Durao Barroso recently presented a Centre for European Reform (CER) study that...

With all the talk in Europe about Islam and Muslim culture it is surprising how little hard-core empirical evidence exists on the compatibility of Muslim culture with positive patterns of political, social, and ecological development in the world system in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond. This...

On the first anniversary of the death of Nobel Laureate Professor Franco Modigliani, the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies (LIEIS) organised a conference on 'Reforming European Pension Systems' on 24 and 25 September 2004 in Schengen. Initially, the intention was to...

This article portrays a bleak picture of European realities. Analyzing world social, gender, ecological and economic development on the basis of the main 9 predictors, compatible with the majority of the more than 240 published studies on the cross-national determinants of the human condition...