The paper analyses the social protection systems of the Baltic States comparing them to the existing systems of the other European countries and discussing poverty reduction strategies, pension systems, social and unemployment assistance, labour market policies and regulations. The aim is to...

The Eastern enlargement of the European Union and the requirements of the European Monetary Union call for increased flexibility of labour markets in both the current EU members and candidate countries. If labour markets and institutions are rigid in the monetary union, market disequilibrium is...

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the impact of EU-accession on the Estonian food sector from the point of view of potential changes in foreign trade. Estonia has followed radical macroeconomic reforms in the 1990’s and is well known by its extremely liberal trade policy including the...

We study the role of political institutions in the regional allocation of public infrastructure investments in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. We estimate the regional variation in the allocation for each country, controlling for the potential endogeneity of its impact on growth and...

The current debate on the role of regional politics in the Euro pean Union (EU) is dominated by approaches that focus upon either intergovernmental bargaining or multi-level govern ance. Because Structural Funds are the main EU-wide redis tributive policy, we propose to apply the traditional...

Struggles over what a region receives, or should receive, from the budget of the central government are common to many countries. Discussions often focus on the measures of ‘net fiscal flows’ or ‘fiscal balances’ provided by the government or other actors. This unique...

This paper investigates the long-term evolution of the tax system in Germany to explain why the political left has increasingly expanded taxation to its own clientele. The paper contrasts the second half of the 19th with the second half of the 20th century to show that some of the underlying...

We show that tax competition in the EU is shaped by four interrelated institutional mechanisms: 1) Market integration, by reducing the transaction costs of cross-border tax arbitrage in the Single Market, 2) enlargement, by increasing the number and heterogeneity of states involved in intra-EU...

This paper proposes a simultaneous-equation approach to the estimation of the contribution of infrastructure accumulation to private production. A political-economy model for the allocation of public infrastructure investment grants is formulated. Our empirical findings, using a panel of large...