Financial assets are generally chosen for encapsulating wealth effects in empirical work on aggregate consumption, but there is growing interest in tangible wealth, notably housing, as a potential determinant. We estimate consumption functions for the G-5, country-by-country and on a panel...

Abstract Liberalisation of the trading environment, through regional integration and the formation of WTO, is shown to increase trade growth relative to GDP. The impact of trade liberalisation compounded over time and added about 1.5 per cent per annum to world trade growth during the last...

The paper discusses European and East Asian Integration, and makes some comparisons between developments in the two regions. We stress that the process of integration is a political process as well as an economic one, and that the stimulation of competition is more important than the generation...

In this paper we briefly discuss the current condition of the German economy and the proposals from the government in March 2003 to reform labour markets. These reforms involve various measures to reduce the generosity of benefits and to increase the incentives to work. In order to analyse these...

This paper describes the National Institute of Economic and Social Research’s (NIESR)approach to the analysis of the implementation of the Lisbon Agenda. It forms the background to the European Commission Competitiveness Report chapter on spillovers and the Lisbon Process. The paper describes...

This paper considers the macroeconomic effects of the migration that followed the enlargement of the EU in May 2004. At that time the EU was expanded to include 10 New Member States (NMS) predominantly from Central and Eastern Europe. In the wake of accession the number of workers migrating to...

The UK has to decide whether to join the other members of the EU in a monetary union. This choice depends in part on the outturns for the economy inside and outside EMU. The UK has chosen to target inflation, and this can involve some 'price level drift', whilst the ECB emphasises 'Price...

New member states will join the EMU in the coming years. Setting the central parity has been and will be a challenging task, as there is a considerable amount of uncertainty, both from a theoretical and an empirical perspective, surrounding the determination of the optimal exchange rate. In...