Banks in European Transition Economies are proportionally lending less than their counterparts in the Eurozone in the face of seemingly profitable loan opportunities, whilst apparently continuously holding excess liquidity. The question that arises is whether banks in European Transition...

This report analyses higher education (HE) provision and labour market opportunities in Kosovo by looking at several inter-related issues: the provision of HE, current labour market conditions for graduates, the challenges graduates face during their transition from HE to the labour market, the...

This paper investigates the monetary transmission mechanism in the Republic of Macedonia to better inform monetary policy, which is currently dedicated to price stability. We analyse long-run equilibrium relationships, adjustment mechanisms and short-run influences between the price level,...

Analyses of market-based reforms of state schooling have occasionally acknowledged positional elements in parental demand, but none has fully examined their nature and implications. Contrary to the normal predictions of orthodox economic analysis, competition in positional markets can result in...

There is a wide range of theoretical and empirical analyses suggesting that technological change has increased the demand for skills. Since training is a mechanism to upgrade workers’ skills, it would be expected that technical progress strengthens the importance of training on account of the...

The market choice critique was an important part of the arguments which led to UK schooling reforms, yet economic analysis has been neglected in assessments of those reforms. We provide an economic critique of the operation of schooling quasi-markets and use this to re-interpret the findings of...

Discussions and debates among scholars on "techno-globalism" and "techno-nationalism" centre on the significance of knowledge augmenting or basic research in the R&D activities of multinational firms. Not every researcher, however, shares this dichotomy [see Archibugi & Michie, 1995] but, it...

One of the promised consequences of market-based reforms of state schooling systems was an increase in the diversity of curricula offered in schools. In this paper we utilise economic analysis to explore the influence of an increase in competitive pressures within a local schooling market on the...

Little is known about the social and private returns to graduation for mature students in the U K. However, the post-Dearing changes in the funding of higher education have initially been associated with a significant fall in applications from this group of entrants. This paper, by providing an...