"Unfunded pay-as-you-go state pension schemes are financially unsustainable in Europe as elsewhere. Proponents of reform argue that, by switching to a fully funded scheme that takes advantage of the high return on assets such as equities, the solvency of the state scheme could be restored at...

The European economic and monetary union (EMU) is now over 4 years old. In this paper we assess whether monetary union has begun to have significant economic effects by comparing countries in EMU with the EU countries outside. We focus principally on trade creation between EMU member countries,...