Globalisation is the stepping stone for plenty of articles, essays and papers on social transformation, as it is for this one. Of the many questions raised by globalisation, one that has attracted much attention lately, is how this so-called globalisation affects the national and international...

During the past fifty years the European Union has gone a long way, even though some would like to have gone even further. It is possible to look at the EU as a social ecosystem, and as such as different from other ecosystems. This is a result of the fact that human populations, contrary to...

Migrant integration in Arnsberg has primarily taken place by opening up the core institutions, such as the education system and the labour market, to migrants and by including migrants in the national welfare system. With regard to the housing market, this means that non-Germans have the same...

Antwerp is the largest city in Flanders, with 470,044 inhabitants in 2006. Some 13% of the city’s population consists of foreigners, of whom 8% are non-EU nationals. Antwerp’s municipal housing policy aims to sustain and even increase the diversity within the city. This diversity pertains...

The city of Vienna’s integration policies since the beginning of the 1990s have aimed to achieve equal rights and opportunities for immigrants in all spheres of social and economic, cultural and political life of the local population. Thus, a comprehensive set of measures were implemented to...

Stuttgart has about 600,000 inhabitants, almost a quarter of whom are foreigners and 40% have a migration background. In this prosperous city, the integration of migrants has primarily taken place through structural integration into the labour market. The city included migrants in the general...

As early as the 1960s, due to its industrial facilities, Frankfurt became one of the first main destinations for guest workers. Today, almost 161,000 foreigners from 130 countries live in Frankfurt, accounting for one quarter of the city’s population. Frankfurt’s housing market, particularly...

This paper employs stochastic simulations of a small structural rational expectations model to investigate the consequences of the zero bound on nominal interest rates. We find that if the economy is subject to stochastic shocks similar in magnitude to those experienced in the U.S. over the...