This guide shows how a life cycle approach can be used to identify and reduce the environmental and health impacts of the products we use. It underlines the importance of considering these issues across the entire life cycle of a product and sets them within the context of policy development,...

This Country Focus studies the development of private consumption in France during the decade before the crisis. Are French consumers greater spendthrifts than their European fellows? In this paper, we estimate a consumption function to show that strong growth of private consumption in France...

In Germany private consumption virtually stagnated for nearly a decade and clearly lagged behind GDP growth. This Country Focus uses the estimation of a consumption function to show that the drop in employment is the most important factor behind the reluctance to consume in the first half of...

This study analyses au pair arrangements in six EU Member States (Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain) through descriptions of national and international legal frameworks and practices of au pairing. The findings show different patterns of au pair migration and different...

The School of Slavonic and East European Studies is one of the world's leading specialist institutions, and the largest national centre in the UK, for the study of Central, Eastern and South-East Europe and Russia; it possesses one of the most important research libraries in its field.