This paper considers the issue of sovereign debts in the Eurozone. The reasons for the reduction of public debt, which are quite strong in the present circumstances of slow growth, are briefly discussed with reference to EMU countries. Then the different possible strategies to reduce the public...

In the last decades inequality of opportunity has been extensively studied by economists, on the assumption that, in addition to being normatively undesirable, it can be related to low potential for growth. In this paper we evaluate inequality of opportunity in 11 Sub-Saharan Africa countries....

We show that, when measuring inequality of opportunity with survey data, scholars incur two types of biases. A well-known downward-bias, due to partial observability of circumstances that affect individual outcome, and an upward bias, which depends on the econometric method used and the quality...

Does the way scholars measure inequality of opportunity correspond to how people perceive it? What other factors influence individual perception of this phenomenon? To answer these questions we must first clarify how scholars define and measure inequality of opportunity. We discuss the possible...

This paper investigates, using panel cointegration methods, the long-run drivers of current account imbalances in 15 EU member States during the period 1974-2011. We argue that the degree of trade openness greatly affects the relative strength of the different long-term drivers of current...

This paper studies the dynamics of international trade from the perspective of knowledge spillover. Building into an idea-flow model the industry dimension, I integrate four channels of knowledge spillover: each firm could learn from domestic producers as well as foreign sellers, and learning is...

The existing economic literature focuses on the benefits that return migrants offer to their home country in terms of entrepreneurship, human and financial capital accumulation. However, return migration can have modest or even some detrimental effects if the migration experience was...

We analyze the impact of globalization on the incentive to strengthen regional integration. In a simple three-country oligopolistic trade model, we demonstrate that increased external competitive pressure may induce governments, influenced by producer interests, to lower intra-regional trade...

Consider a finite data set where each observation consists of a bunde of contingent consumption chosen by an agent from a constraint set of such bundles.  We develop a general procedure for testing the consistency of this data set with a broad class of models of choice under risk and under...

This paper explores the effect of news shocks on the current account and other macroeconomic variables using worldwide giant oil discoveries as a directly observable measure of news shocks about future output - the delay between a discovery and production is on average 4 to 6 years.  We first...