International lessons from emerging economies suggest that business associations may provide an effective channel of communication between the government and the private sector. This function of business associations may become still more important in transition economies, where old mechanisms...

This article analyses how regional employment growth in Germany is affected by related variety, unrelated variety and the functions a region performs in the production process. Following the related variety literature, we argue that regions benefit from the existence of related activities that...

The import penetration of exports has become a topic of public debate, particularly in the context of Germany’s position as one of the world’s leading exporters. The growth in the volume of intermediate products purchased from abroad for subsequent processing into export goods in Germany...

This article uses co-integration and related techniques to test for a long-run causal relationship between the fiscal and external deficits of three post-transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition, an import propensity model is tested by applying OLS and GMM. All the results...

Similarly to western Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, the eastern part of Germany has experienced a still ongoing process of numerous amalgamations among counties, towns and municipalities since the mid-1990s. The evidence in the economic literature is mixed with regard to the claimed expenditure...

Structural Funds are the main instrument of the EU cohesion policy. Their effective use is subject to an ongoing debate in political and scientific circles. European fiscal assistance under this heading should promote economic and social cohesion in the member states of the European Union....

In the tradition of Romer and Romer (2000), this paper compares staff forecasts of the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) for inflation and output with corresponding private forecasts. Standard tests show that the Fed and less so the ECB have a considerable information...

The comparison of cities with regard to their economic or demographic development may yield misleading results, if solely the cities in their administrative borders are the object of consideration. Frequently, historical borders of cities neither conform to the contemporary settlement...

State-controlled banks are currently at the core of financial intermediation in Russia. This paper aims to assess the magnitude of government banking, and to reveal some of its special features and arrangements. We distinguish between directly and indirectly state-controlled banks and construct...

Empirical and theoretical contributions provide strong evidence that firm-level performance outcomes in terms of innovativeness can either be determined by the firm’s position in the social space (network effects) or by the firm’s position in the geographical space (co-location effects)....