The savings measures of private households currently exceed the limited financing needs of companies around the world, and the difference is reflected in an increase in sovereign debt. In the EU, over the last two and a half decades non-financial corporations recorded funding surpluses in one...

Economic policy in the EU faces a trilemma of solving three challenges simultaneously - growth, distribution, and the environment. In order to assess policies that address these issues simultaneously, economic models need to account for both sector-sector and sector-environment feedbacks within...

The debate on growth versus the environment is usually summarized as optimists believing in limitless growth versus pessimists seeing environmental and resource limits to growth. This opposition defines the main strategies: namely, striving for green growth versus some anti-growth approach. In...

Taking into account the potentially different starting and framework conditions of regions in different parts of the European Union, we will present a new approach for sustainability transition analysis. We hypothesise: favourable overall institutional conditions, such as a high degree of formal...

Climate policy has been mainly studied with economic models that assume representative, rational agents. However, it aims at changing behavior associated with carbon-intensive goods that are often subject to bounded rationality and social preferences, such as status and imitation. Here we use a...

This paper assesses whether or to what extent the macroeconomic imbalances, which emerged in the "North" and "South" of the European Monetary Union before the financial and economic crisis of 2008/09, are symmetric. Firstly, we calculate bilateral exports and imports between all EU member...

The paper describes to which extent European welfare states support an individual adult worker model and how the current policy should be assessed in terms of gender equality. Although a more individual design of welfare policies is clearly recognizable, the paper also illustrates the large gap...

This report collects and draws conclusions from research papers of Area 1. It summarises the results against the background of the existing literature, focusing in particular on the challenges arising on welfare states from globalisation, post-industrialisation, and demographic changes. The...

Fears of increasing inequality play a dominant role in current debates on how globalization is affecting our economies. After a brief review of recent trends in wage inequality, this policy paper presents new insights on the dynamic effect of trade liberalization on wage inequality. In the...