The purpose of this paper is to analyse, for the case of Portugal, the effectiveness of wage reduction - a current proposal since 2011 to help the country to reverse the high public and external debt - in promoting the efficiency and international competitiveness of the economy. A static...

We evaluate the efficiency of basic and secondary education in 24 governorates of Tunisia during the period 1999-2008 using a non-parametric approach, DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis). We use four inputs: number of teacher per 100 students, number of classes per 100 students, number of schools...

This paper identifies the determinants of macroeconomic forecasts (budget balance, public debt and real GDP growth), of the governments of the 15 EU countries. We have used the forecasts of the Stability and Convergence Programmes submitted between 1998/99 and 2008/09 and the European...

After the banking crises experienced by many countries in the 1990s and in 2008, financial market conditions have turned out to be a relevant factor for economic fluctuations. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether frictions in financial markets are important for business cycles, and...

It is well known that not all innovations are patented, but the exact volume of innovative activities undertaken outside the coverage of patent protection and, relatedly, the actual propensity to patent an innovation in different contexts remain, to a major degree, a matter of speculation. This...

We assess the existence of fiscal regime shifts in the U.K., Germany, and Italy, using Markov switching fiscal rules. On the basis of a newly built quarterly data set, our results show the existence of fiscal regimes shifts, sometimes coupled with regime switches also regarding monetary...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the causality relations between bank performance and economic growth in a panel including 27 European Union member-states from 1996 through to the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. Bank performance is represented not only by the Return on Assets (ROA)...

The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the structure and evolution of production, employment and human capital in Portugal, using an inter-industry approach. A descriptive analysis of the sector composition of gross output, value added and employment is made, followed by a quantification...

This paper addresses the issue of industrial development using a coordination game. Complementarities between transport infrastructure provision by the Government and consumer goods manufacturing firms, and among consumer goods firms themselves dictate the outcome: either the transport...

We analyze the productivity changes in basic and secondary education for 24 governorates in Tunisia over the period 2004-2008. In methodological term, we employ the Malmquist index, to estimate changes in total factor productivity which can be decomposed into two main components namely,...