The promotion and support of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) forms an essential ingredient of the policies designed to help improve Europe's economic performance. A key issue is whether SMEs face difficulty obtaining bank loans. Using pre-crisis survey data from 2005 and 2006 for...

Structural reforms to labour and product markets help to improve economic growth prospects and the ability of economies to adjust to shocks by expanding flexibility and improving the efficiency of how and where productive factors are used. The recent financial and economic crisis prompted EU...

This paper uses a vertical differentiation duopoly framework to analyze firms’ relocation decisions, when the removal of trade barriers or restrictions on capital outflows or inflows (“globalization”) allows them to serve the domestic market through foreign plants in low-wage countries....

This paper notes that the Mankiw, Romer, and Weil formulation of the augmented Solow growth model has implications not only for the steady-state growth rates but also for how these growth rates would change if there are changes in fundamentals. The analysis supports several of Mankiw, Romer, and...

This note presents work done by the Commission Services aiming at quantifying the benefits from the implementation of the Directive across all Member States. This is the first attempt to assess its economic impact taking into account the actual way it has been implemented across Member States....

In an insightful and influential paper, Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) have suggested that an augmented Solow growth model can account for 80% of the variation in output per capita across countries due to different steady-state growth paths that result from differences in saving rates, education,...