Two approaches to the theory of OCA are distinguished in this paper. The first attempts to define the OCA from the point of view of a single country, and the second examines the optimality of a currency area of a given size anf membership. The present paper after reviewing the drawbacks of the...

The unemployment rate in Greece rose from a mere 2.2% in the 1970s to 6.4% in the 1980s and 10% approximately in the mid-1990s. Currently, it gravitates around that level. In this paper we present the stylized facts of unemployment in Greece and examine the causes of its abrupt increse in the...

Measured against PPP, the drachma effective exchange rate was overvalued by a significant amount, implying that the devaluation on March 1998 was an adjustment of the exchange rate towards the long-run price differentials. The paper also analyses the links between fiscal policy, interest rates...

Measured against PPP, the drachma effective exchange rate was overvalued by a significant amount, implying that the devaluation on March 1998 was an adjustment of the exchange rate towards the long-run price differentials. The paper also analyses the links between fiscal policy, interest rates...

The unemployment rate in Greece rose from a mere 2.2% in the 1970s to 6.4% in the 1980s and 10% approximately in the mid-1990s. Currently, it gravitates around that level. In this paper we present the stylized facts of unemployment in Greece and examine the causes of its abrupt increse in the...

We apply the hedonic analysis on a nation-wide microeconomic dataset of Indonesia. Our results indicate that in urban areas, people value having improved domestic water sources (piped and pump water), while this is not true for households in rural areas. Moreover, households in both urban and...

The scarcity of water resources in both arid and temperate countries alike is one of the most pervasive natural resource allocation problems facing water users and policy-makers. In arid countries this problem is faced each day in the myriad of conflicts that surround its use.Water scarcity is a...

In this paper a Methodology for Integrated Socio-Economic Assessment (MISEA) of the viability and sustainability of different designs of Multi-Use Offshore Platforms (MUOPs) is presented. MUOPs are designed for multi-use of ocean space for energy extraction (wind power production and wave...

Imputed rental income of homeowners is tax exempt in most countries, despite the long-standing arguments recommending its inclusion in the tax base, on both equity and efficiency grounds. The current fiscal crisis revived interest towards this form of taxation. The paper investigates the fiscal...

A major environmental tragedy of modern times is the widespread arsenic contamination of shallow drinking water wells in rural Bangladesh which went unrecognized for years. Large numbers of people are now starting to show a range of symptoms long associated with chronic arsenic exposure. Rural...