Due to ageing population and low birth rates, the European Union (EU) will need to import foreign labour in the next decades. In this context, the EU neighbouring countries (ENC) are the main countries of origin and transit of legal and illegal migration towards Europe. Their economic, cultural...

The idea in this paper is to provide an empirical verification of the relationship between innovation adoption and productivity growth. After a brief revision of the literature about the concept and main determinants of innovation adoption/diffusion, the paper provides empirical evidence of the...

This paper uses a structural model to analyse the impact of innovation activities, including intra- and inter-industry externalities, on the productivity of Spanish firms. To the best of our knowledge, no previous paper has examined spillover effects by adopting such an approach. Here,...

DThe European Union launched the Lisbon Strategy in 2000 with the aim of establishing itself as the world’s most competitive knowledge-based economy. At the same time, job quality was placed at the top of the European employment and social policy agenda and, later, it was to be incorporated as...

The location of economic activity, in general, and of that of activities of business excellence (high-tech or knowledgeintensive businesses that have a low environmental impact), in particular, is not dependent on one single factor, but rather on a series of economic, geographical, social and...

Globalisation and technological advances have made possible to offshore specific productive tasks (that do not require physical proximity to the actual location of the work unit) to foreign countries where these are usually performed at lower costs. We analyse the effect of task trade (i.e. task...

In this paper we design and build a composite indicator to measure the macroeconomic, social and institutional dimensions of countries (ISEPI). The index allows not only comparing the relative situation of countries, but also its time evolution. In order to illustrate the usefulness of the...

The evolution of income inequality is becoming a great concern all over the World, particularly since the start of the Great Recession. In this work we analyse the main trends of income inequality in Europe over the last decade, both at the national and regional level. Our results point to a...

The objective of this paper is to analyse and explain the factors behind the observed differences in skill mismatches (vertical and horizontal) between natives and immigrants in EU countries. Using microdata from the 2007 wave of the Adult Education Survey (AES), different probit models are...

This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the relationship between wage inequality, employment structure, and returns to education in urban areas of Mexico during the past two decades (1987-2008). Applying Melly’s (2005) quantile regression based decomposition, we find that changes in wage...