The sector business services contributes directly and indirectly to aggregate economic growth in Europe. The direct contribution comes from the sector’s own dynamism. Though the business-services industry appears to be characterised by strong cyclical volatility, there was also a strong...

This paper compares the international trade pattern of Portugal with the other three EU15 Cohesion countries - Spain, Greece and Ireland - over the last forty years. The paper adopts a fact-finding approach, investigating the degree of openness of these economies and making extensive use of the...

Extensive multilingualism is one of the most important and fundamental principles of the European Union. However, a large number of official languages (currently 23) hinders communication and imposes substantial financial and legal costs. We address the merits of multilingualism and formulate an...

We estimate the effect of immigrant flows on native employment in Western Europe, and then ask whether the employment consequences of immigration vary with institutions that affect labour market flexibility. Reduced flexibility may protect natives from immigrant competition in the near term, but...

We examine the growth performance of Sweden in the post-World War II period, focusing on explaining the relative decline of economic growth in Sweden since the early 1970's. The hypothesis that the relative decline is a consequence of productivity catch-up is rejected. A number of potential...

Economic unification forced an unprecedented adjustment crisis on the East German economy. The revolutionary shock of the transformation of the economic order was reinforced by a real appreciation shock exceeding 50%, due to the immediate introduction of the Deutschmark. This paper examines in...

Eastern Europe is engaged in a massive programme of financial reform. This paper argues that while this programme has many desirable features, it has failed to address some of the most basic issues. These concern the relationship between the financial system and the enterprise sector, and the...

Germany is generally regarded as the nominal anchor for Europe. Its participation is the sine qua non of EMU. It has been the largest net contributor to EU finances, the leading proponent of greater economic and political union, and the leading example of the virtues of fiscal and monetary...

Economic growth in Denmark in the post-war years has been close to the OECD average. The `golden age' of very high growth was, however, of shorter duration in Denmark than in most other OECD countries. The main emphasis in this paper is on the description of productivity performance in the...

In this paper we adopt the Selten-Pool model (1993) framework of language acquisition that is based on the notion of communicative benefits and learning costs. We consider a model with languages that serve as imperfect substitutes and show that under supermodularity of the communicative benefits...