The decision to cease working is traditionally influenced by a wide set of socio-economic and environmental variables. In this paper, we study transitions out of work for 26 EU countries over the period 2004-2009 in order to investigate the determinants of retirement based on the Eurostat Survey...

Fiscal surveillance was developed as a supranational regulatory process to counteract short-termism and deficit biases in government decision-making. With effective monetary policy to stabilize the economy, restraint on the fiscal discretion of national governments was seen as the key to...

This paper examines the regional growth process of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe since the start of their transition to market economies. It relates this to three distinctive explanations of regional growth and examines empirically their relevance in explaining the patterns of...

Many political scientists and economists have addressed the implications of the public sector’s sheltered status on their unions’ wage strategies vis-à-vis the government. Since the public sector is a monopoly provider of necessary and price inelastic services, conventional wisdom suggests...

Choice and competition policies in public services are popular reform strategies in the member states of the European Union (EU). The European choice agenda is based on the view in the EU of ‘social policy as a productive factor’ and the need for ‘modernisation’ of the EU welfare states....

Since the early 1990s the European Union has struggled to increase integration in the sovereignty sensitive areas of justice and home affairs and foreign policy. The aim of this paper is to enhance our understanding of what patterns of cooperation have been established between the member states,...

The European Monetary Union (EMU) has removed crucial instruments of macroeconomic management from the control of democratically accountable governments. Worse yet, it has been the systemic cause of destabilizing macroeconomic imbalances that member states found difficult or impossible to...

This article analyses the recourse to religion as a source of law in the legal and political order of the European Union. It demonstrates that the legitimacy of religious input into law is recognised institutionally, symbolically and substantively. However, religious influence within the...

Andy Rose (2000), followed by many others, has used the gravity model of bilateral trade on a large data set to estimate the trade effects of monetary unions among small countries. The finding has been large estimates: Trade among members seems to double or triple, that is, to increase by...

The question of the European cultural heritage and the wider historical legacy of Europe has been the subject of much discussion in recent years as is reflected in new approaches to memory and commemoration, values, and European identity. Unlike earlier histories, which generally contained a...