Life expectancy, fertility rates and migration flows are the key determining factors underlying all population projections. The share of elderly people in the overall population is presently of the order of 15 percent in the EC, US, and Japan. This paper examines the economic implications of...

The decision to launch EMU has focused attention on possible asymmetries in output and prices responses to the single monetary policy across EU countries. Unfortunately, the numerous attempts to establish the extent of such asymmetries in the context of empirical macroeconomic models have not...

This paper discusses an approach to estimate euro area GDP quarterly growth over two quarters ahead. The estimates are derived from separate single equations for each quarter to be forecast using OLS including a moving error term. The explanatory variables describe real economic activity or its...

The study reviews various approaches applied in computing net replacement rates for the unemployed. Until now, there have been relatively new comparative studies on net replacement rates. Most of them are based on simulation calculations for a set of stylised households. The stylised calculation...

This paper combines both qualitative and quantitative economic analysis which shows that further multilateral trade liberalization through a WTO trade round could yield significant benefits for the global economy.

In 1968 Friedman put forward the notion of a natural rate of unemployment to encapsulate the idea that a normal level of unemployment, roughly equivalent to the amount of frictional and structural unemployment, persists even when the labour market is in equilibrium. Since there are no direct...