Since the onset of the sovereign debt crisis, the crisis-stricken countries in Europe have been pushed to take drastic steps to consolidate their finances and reduce their budget deficits. Despite strong public opposition and largely damaging short-run effects, the countries have undertaken many...

The Eurozone crisis has given a new impetus to academic and policy debates about the merits and ills of fiscal consolidation policies (austerity). Fuelled by the huge contraction experienced by some ‘bailout countries’, and especially Greece, a new consensus seems to have emerged, that...

Regional disparities in Central and Eastern Europe rose substantially since 1990. Still, prima facie evidence of beta-convergence is often found in the CEE data. To reconcile this seeming paradox, we sketch out and test empirically a hybrid model of regional growth that draws on the regional...

Employment flexibility is commonly associated to greater labour mobility and thus faster cross-regional adjustments. The literature however offers very little hard evidence on this and quite limited theoretical guidance. This paper examines empirically the relationship between employment...

This paper examines the geographical impact of the recent austerity measures in Greece. Owing to compositional differences across regions, the horizontal measures are found to amplify existing disparities. It is argued that under certain conditions, relating to wider spatial imbalances in the...

A large panel of regional UK data is used to provide detailed estimates of the direct and external effects of education and labour market experience on wages. The results offer strong evidence in support of the predictions of the endogenous growth theory (Lucas, 1988), where the - spatial or...

We examine the Greek public–private wage differential before the debt crisis to evaluate the prospective impact of the recent public sector pay cuts. We find a large public premium which persists after controlling for individual and job characteristics. For men, much of this is accounted for...

The process of approximation between the EU and its ‘eastern neighbourhood’ has created conditions for deepening economic interactions and market integration, giving to the EU –and to EU businesses– an elevated role in the process of economic modernisation and transition in the...

The Eastern Enlargement of the EU saw a proliferation of association agreements with countries in the Ônear abroadÕ under EUÕs European Neighbourhood Policy framework. Although such agreements are considered to be strictly welfare-enhancing, there is very little evidence to show their...