The concept of fair representation of voters in a committee representing different voters' groups, such as national representations in union of states, is discussed. This concept, introduced into discussion about voting rights in the Council of European Union in 2004, was narrowed to proposal of...

This paper analyzes pension reforms in Europe and their determinants. As pension reforms are intrinsically difficult to define and pinpoint, we introduce an alternative measure of pension reforms by comparing long-term forecasts of pension expenditures for seventeen European countries. The...

Ten Central European countries became members of the European Union in the years 2004 - 2007. They constitute 20% of the EU's total population; and even though their economic output is much lower, it rises dynamically. New members' impact on the EU policies has nevertheless been limited. This is...

This study analyses the income distribution within couples in the Czech Republic and ten European countries using the EU-SILC 2005 database. Data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) database supplement the analysis with previous period (1986 - 2000). Women, on average, contribute less to a...

Inflation persistence has been put forward as one of the potential reasons of divergence among euro area members. It has also been proposed that the new EU Member States (NMS) may struggle with even higher persistence due to convergence factors. We argue that persistence may not be as different...

The European Union (EU) is not de jure a federation, but after 50 years of institutional evolution it possesses attributes of a federal state. One can conclude that EU is something between federation and intergovernmental organization. If we measure something between by interval [0, 1], where 0...

This paper concentrates on the golden rule of public finance. It reviews the main advantages and disadvantages of the potential implementation of this rule in the European Union. Often the question of the productivity of public capital is at the heart of the rule's discussions. As this issue has...

This study aims to analyse the sensitivity of capital requirements to changes in risk parameters (PD, LGD and M) by creating a model bank with a portfolio mirroring the average asset composition of internationally active large banks, as well as locally oriented smaller institutions participating...

This paper aims to estimate bank efficiency differences across member states of the European Union and tries to explain their causes. We show on an empirical basis that the level and spread of bank efficiency in the EU and their changes are significantly determined by characteristics of...

This paper documents the existence and main patterns of inter-industry wage differentials across a large number of industries for 8 EU countries (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain) at two points in time (in general 1995 and 2002) and explores possible...