The existence and the use of the essential facilities doctrine was questioned in theory and in practice. Although the doctrine was developed in antitrust, it became a frequently cited notion in the regulation of network utilities. Its relevance is hotly debated during the setup of the new...

This article considers the relationship between centralised, exogenous institutions and the embedded, endogenous institutions of rural governance in Europe through an examination of the evaluation procedures of the European LEADER programme. LEADER is presented in the literature as progressive...

In the employment increase of 12 million of the European Union the number of part time employees accounted for nearly 6 million between 2000 and 2006. A great number of countries try to support the distribution of part-time employment in order to raise or maintain the level of employment and to...

The European Union used to make decisions by unanimity or near unanimity. After a series of extensions, with 27 member states the present decision making mechanisms have become very slow and assigned power to the members in an arbitrary way. The new decision rules accepted as part of the Lisbon...

The euro area is facing crisis, while the US is not, though the overall fiscal situation and outlook is better in the euro area than in the US, and though the US faces serious state-level fiscal crises. A higher level of fiscal federalism would strengthen the euro area, but is not inevitable....

The 'currency war', as it has become known, has three aspects: 1) the inflexible pegs of undervalued currencies; 2) recent attempts by floating exchange-rate countries to resist currency appreciation; 3) quantitative easing. Europe should primarily be concerned about the first issue, which...

The paper investigates the effect of teacher characteristics (experience, level of education attainment and credentials, gender) on the achievement of eighth grade students using matched student-teacher data from the 1999, 2003 and 2007 TIMSS surveys. The analysis covers European countries, thus...

Highlights: - The European Union growth agenda has become even more pressing because growth is needed to support public and private sector deleveraging, reduce the fragility of the banking sector, counter the falling behind of southern European countries and prove that Europe is still a...

This paper examines the impact of EU enlargement on agro-food export performance across 12 new EU member states and 5 newly independent states in the EU markets covering the period 1999-2007. The performance is examined by duration of export and hazard model. We find larger duration for the...

This paper examines adult education in Hungary for the years 1999, 2001 and 2003 along three dimensions: (a) the fraction of individuals participating in adult education, (b) their demographic and socio-economic characteristics and (c) the probability of participating in adult education / adult...