The article shows that the option of Turkish accession to the EU is far better than the continued non-accession. The articles analyses in quantitative terms the trajectory of Turkey's candidacy and shows pure "technical" terms Turkey's achievements in social and health policy are not an...

For many years, EU-27-Europe’s political-economic strategy was characterized by an intensive opening to the forces of globalization and the realization of the ‘four freedoms’ of goods, capital, labour and services on the EU-27-European ‘internal market’. The present article is a 175...

For some years now, the Happy Planet Organization presents the so-called ‘Happy Planet Index’ (HPI), which is an index of measuring the trade-off between ecological footprint data and life quality (Happy Life Years, HLYE). Costa Rica emerges from these comparisons as the world’s ‘best...

This article looks at the long-term, structural determinants of environmental performance in the world system. In multiple standard OLS regression models, we test the effects of 26 standard predictor variables, including the ‘four freedoms’ of goods, capital, labour and services, on the...

This empirical study about global Catholicism, based on the data of the World Values Survey and the European Social Survey, starts with a philosophical introduction by Christian Ghymers (Brussels) on the Roman Catholic Church and Enlightenment. The essence of Ghymers’ proposal to democratize...

In this contribution, we look again at the trajectory and the efficiency of the ‘European social model’ (EMS). We re-apply an econometric methodology, which was already used in the study Herrmann, Heshmati et al., 2008, 2009. In that study, the authors said that apart from Finland and the...

The cross-national empirics of the international asylum system are in their infancy. While Hatton, 2009, and Neumayer, 2005, 2006a and 2006b provided important and valuable cross-national insights on the drivers of the asylum seeking process, as yet little is known in terms of hard-core evidence...

With a budget of 308 billion euros, the EU structural funds are alongside agriculture (418 billion euros) the largest item of the EU budget. 12 percent of the funds, according to the Court of Accountability of the European Parliament end up in wrong channels, and in the international press...

In this qualitative sociological and quantitative economic policy paper, we show the trade-off between social expenditures and absolute poverty, and construct a non-parametric efficiency indicator, combining the residuals from the trade-off between social expenditures per capita and absolute...

In this qualitative sociological and quantitative economic policy paper, we start out from the assumption of a very recent European Commission Background paper on the "Efficiency and effectiveness of social spending", which says the effectiveness of social spending can be defined by the degree...