Germany has had an extremely low growth performance since 1995. The paper looks at the long-run reasons for this loss of economic dynamics besides German unification: These include leaving labor idle, a declining share of investment in GDP, a weaker innovative activity, an ineffective system for...

The authors review the challenges that the Romanian economy and society had to face in the European and global geoeconomic context. Starting from the perspectives advanced by the international economic fora, the risks the European economy will have to answer through counteracting and general...

The paper suggests that international differences in educational institutions explain the large international differences in student performance in cognitive achievement tests. A microeconometric student-level estimation based on data for more than 260,000 students from 39 countries reveals that...

I reconsider the primacy of institutions over geography as an explanatory factor of cross-country differences in economic performance, which has recently been postulated by Acemoglu et al. (2001) and others. My estimates show that the reported missing direct performance effects of a measure of...

Some recent empirical studies deny any direct performance effects of measures of geography and conclude that institutions trump all other potential determinants of development. For given effects of institutional quality, our empirical results indicate quantitatively important direct negative...

The bioeconomy-specific paradigm has changed the perception of economic growth in the sense that the growth limits do not matter, but new growth opportunities. These are focused on: knowledge, investment in research, innovation and technological performance, which give meaning to the concept of...