Portugal's high public debt, its weak economic growth and its great attractiveness for foreign tourists are legend. Less well known is its unstable system of public pensions. This article addresses the underlying economic and political reasons, such as poor labour productivity, low real wages,...

This paper investigates determinants of convergence in GDP per capita in the euro area and the EU between 1995 and 2021. It finds that the COVID-19 crisis temporarily slowed convergence but the estimated negative impact is significantly smaller than during the global financial crisis. Diverging...

The European Union must identify and internalize the most acute challenges, prepare appropriate solutions to them, capitalize on its strengths, and avoid threats. The strategic philosophy can no longer be just rhetorical but must be found at the level of all European sectoral policies, national...

The fraction of R&D active firms decreased in Switzerland but increased in the Netherlands from 2000-2016. This paper examines reasons for this divergence and its impact on productivity growth. Our micro-data reveal R&D concentration among high-productivity firms in Switzerland. Innovation...

In this study, we employ the pairwise stochastic convergence approach to identify the pairs of NUTS2 regions for all 28 EU Member States that exhibit co-movement in their growth dynamics, over the period 1980-2018. We then use the observed stochastic convergence trajectories to assess the role...

The international economic debate on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has focused mainly on trade induced real income gains while the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)-related and innovation induced benefits have been largely neglected, although the EU and the US are...

We examine the trajectories of the real unit labour costs (RULCs) in a selection of Eurozone economies. Strong asymmetries in the convergence process of the RULCs and its components - real wages, capital intensity, and technology - are uncovered through decomposition and cluster analyses. In the...

This paper provides comparative analysis of the proximate causes of growth of South East European, Central European and Former Soviet Union countries. The first section covers comparative sources of growth analysis for GDP. Apart from this conventional sources-of-growth analysis, both the demand...

In his 1966 Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge, entitled On the Causes of the Slow Rate of Economic Growth in the UK, the Hungarian-born British economist, Nicholas Kaldor presented a series of "laws" to account for the growth rate differences between Britain on the one hand, and the more successful...