The Europe 2020 strategy, as adopted by the European Council on June 17, 2010, provides the new framework for the EU’s growth and employment policy. Under the new strategy, measures and reforms should be geared toward smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. The design of the new strategy was...

The year 2000 was exceptionally good for the transition countries. The region as a whole expanded faster than the world economy average. However, the favourable external climate has started to deteriorate rapidly and especially the current pronounced weakening of the EU economy is worrying. The...

Turkey featured a somewhat paradoxical evolution in income distribution between 1994 and 2005. During 1994-2002 (marked by the 2000-2001 financial crisis), growth was pro-poor in the sense that the income of the poor decreased less than the income of the well-off. Between 2002 and 2005, the...

The eurozone is in political and economic crisis. This is due to the inadequate design of the institutional structure of the eurozone and to the current poor implementation of macroeconomic policy. In designing the eurozone, well established principles of economics were ignored and major...

From its early post-war catch-up phase, Germany's formidable export engine has been its consistent driver of growth. But Germany has almost equally consistently run current account surpluses. Exports have powered the dynamic phases and helped emerge from stagnation. Volatile external demand, in...

This paper derives a set of policy lessons for Portugal from the new fiscal framework including a fiscal policy council that gradually emerged in Sweden after the deep economic crisis of the early 1990s. By now, Swedish public finances stand out among the strongest in Europe. Recent Swedish...

Venture capital (VC) investment has long been conceptualized as a local business, in which the VC's ability to source, syndicate, fund, monitor, and add value to portfolio firms critically depends on their access to knowledge obtained through their ties to the local (i.e., geographically...

Between 2000 and 2012, the Portuguese economy grew less than the United States during the Great Depression and less than Japan during its lost decade. This paper asks why this happened, with a particular focus on the slump between 2000 and 2007. It describes the main facts of Portugal's recent...

The year 2003 has witnessed several major reform policy initiatives in Germany intended to contribute to a solution to Germany's high unemployment problem and to improve the longrun sustainability of its social welfare policies. These economic reforms are discussed within a larger macroeconomic...

In this paper we present stylized facts of the Greek economy that characterize the causes and the consequences of its ongoing crisis. Then, we offer an explanation that can account for those causes and consequences. This explanation is based on the view of Greek society as consisting of two...