The article shows that reservations in Europe against Turkey's future membership are really groundless. A Muslim nation already was a member of the EU: Algeria. When Algeria was still a colony, it joined the EU (then: European Economic Community) on January 1st 1958 as a French "Departement",...

In this paper, we examine the exchange rate volatility in selected new EU Member States (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) and candidate countries (Croatia, Romania, Turkey) using TARCH model and daily data from the period May 2004 – December 2006. Besides the volatility estimation,...

“Being rich in energy resources – a blessing or a curse” finds that an energy resource curse plagues many EU supplier states. This in turn directly affects Europe’s energy supply security and threatens to engulf Europe in unwanted hostilities at home and abroad. The study addresses seven...

Since the 1987 Single European Act, the European Union has deepened its integration process. In the case of the determination of the common external tariff, deeper integration implies that the tariff reflected union-wide preferences. If integration is still shallow, though, the observed tariff...

The book, which is available on-line, evaluates the performance of the EU accession countries in the field of social security; disabled people and social inclusion; youth, family and generation policy matters, health policy and veterinary policies. The overall positive evaluation of the maturity...

US poverty is much higher than poverty in Europe when a relative poverty measure is used. Using an absolute poverty measurement method, the picture looks different: poverty in some European countries is higher. This paper estimates poverty rates for all the countries of the (old) EU and the USA...

Die Unterschiede im Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftssystem zwischen den USA und Europa waren zwar immer ausgeprägt, gewinnen aber seit dem Zusammenbruch des gemeinsamen Gegenmodells in der ehemaligen Sowjetunion und in Osteuropa und dem Lissabon-Prozess zunehmend an Bedeutung. Letztens hat diese...

Europe’s market for services is fragmented by many regulatory barriers. The Services directive proposed by the European Commission aims to integrate national services markets by reducing these barriers. Several studies indicate that bilateral trade and foreign direct investment in services...

The European Union’s center-piece of economic policy making is the Lisbon process, which tries to make Europe the most competitive economic region in the world economy by 2010. EU Commission President Jose Manuel Durao Barroso recently presented a Centre for European Reform (CER) study that...

One may say that the European Union is a success story: it is growing and in 2004 it witnessed the most significant enlargement in its history up to now – 10 new countries have become members;two other new countries – Romania and Bulgaria – are ready to join the Union. Beyond these...