In this paper we argue that, for a group of converging economies of the European Union, participation in the euro area has been associated with easier access to financing by domestic economic agents. Easier access to financing was a significant impulse leading to a sharp increase in households'...

The European Union and 2nd pillar integration : the common foreign and security policy / Meltem Muftuler-Bac -- The European security and defence policy : capabilities and institutions / Gulnur Aybet -- The EU as an international actor : "civilian", "normative" or "military" power? / Yannis A....

Inflation differentials within European Monetary Union (EMU) are increasingly seen as exerting adverse effects on the price competitiveness of member countries’ firms and given the common monetary policy within EMU as being detrimental to euro-area economies, in particular to those with...

Inflation differentials in the Euro area are mainly due to a sustained divergence of wage developments across the Euro area, and narrower differences in labour productivity growth (Alvarez et al., 2006). We investigate convergence of inflation using unit labour cost (ULC) growth and applying...

This paper examines whether macroeconomic convergence is an automatic outcome of forming a currency union by combining an analysis of real interest parity (RIP) in the EU with the argument for the endogeneity of the Optimum Currency Area (OCA) criteria. Using the DF-GLS and the CIPS* panel unit...

This paper seeks to assess comovements and heterogeneity in the euro area by fitting a nonstationary dynamic factor model (Bai and Ng, 2004), augmented with a structural factor setup (Forni and Reichlin, 1998), to a large set of euro-area macroeconomic variables observed between 1982 and 2003....