Europe needs change. The financial crisis has exposed long-neglected deficiencies in the present growth path, most visibly in the areas of unemployment and public debt. At the same time, Europe has to cope with new challenges, ranging from globalisation and demographic shifts to new technologies...

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...

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...

We study how the interaction between economic openness and competitive selection affects the effectiveness of employment (and entry) subsidisation. Within a twocountry heterogeneous-firms model with endogenous labour supply, we find that optimal employment subsidies are always positive even...

Most parts of the Euro area have seen seven years of deep economic crisis. The strategy of tightening the fiscal constraints of the SGP has driven many member states into austerity. In contrast, the golden rule of public investment proposed in this study would be one important element of the...

We examine Okun's Law on the basis of new growth perspectives and in the context of the WWWForEurope project. By comparing Okun's work from 1962 with the latest IMF and OECD surveys, a connection is set up and Okun's theoretical framework is updated and its persistence is examined. In addition,...

By responding to the warning voices about the failure of mainstream economics to provide policy advice to seemingly well-known problems as manifest in the ongoing economic crises, we put forward the proposition that the majority of deficiencies in this discipline results from two self-imposed...

Social innovation is booming as a political buzzword. However, the concept still lacks scientific analysis, a common epistemology and a clear-cut definition. This thesis takes a step towards a better theoretical and conceptual understanding of corporate social innovation by detaching the concept...

The term "competitiveness" has been used in conceptually distinct ways at the firm, regional and national levels. After primarily reviewing existing concepts at the national level, we introduce a new definition of regional competitiveness adapting definitions used in the academic literature....