In the last two decades, due to falling barriers to trade and investment, the world economic scenario has profoundly changed. Few rich countries (United States, Great Britain, France, Japan, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands) have been securing a substantial stake in worldwide production...

The embryonically conceived vision for a free Europe as an inevitable premise to strengthen the modern civilization has been deeply rooted in the European unification as a powerful historical urge, deriving from the structural and irreversible crisis of European nation-states. The unification of...

The revised Lisbon Strategy has decided upon an integrated programme of policy reforms envisaging the labor market in the context of globalization, demographic changes and fast technological progress, transposed into the integrated guidelines. Such reforms aimed at increasing the employment...

While European integration has substantially contributed to economic convergence between the member states of the EU, the diverging development of highly developed metropolitan regions and lagging rural areas has become a growing challenge especially for the new member states in Central and...