Europe (and in particular the European Union) is a regional economic area and thus an embedded feature of globalisation. Since the Lisbon Treaty entered into effect on 1 December 2009, the EU has grown from a "political midget" to a notable political "global player". Although Europe has...

In the early 1970s, E.F. Schumacher criticised western industrial countries in the face of emerging globalisation by using a term generated by Leopold Kohr: "Small is beautiful." Seen against the progressing enlargement of the EU we need to ask whether and to what extent small is still...

The report underpins the discussion of applications of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in the welfare sector. Greater use of ICTs is embedded in the Europa 2020 growth strategy which sees the availability of broadband access as a prerequisite for the use of such services....

The study examines four methods to allocate changes in employment to the various employment size categories. For annual data, the reference parameter should be the average size of the enterprise or a dynamic allocation procedure. Due to regression bias, job creation by smaller enterprises is...

Europe is in the throes of budgetary consolidation, tightening its fiscal rules. It could not prevent the recession of 2012 and the inexorable growth of debt, especially in Southern Europe, while unemployment spreads and the social gap widens. Social policy is mostly a national matter, but is...

A small number of firms have a large market share in the Austrian food retailing market. Market concentration has been growing over the last years which has raised concerns about market power. Previous studies on price setting behaviour in the food retailing market were at the national level and...

With seasonal adjustment one has to decide whether to seasonal adjust an aggregate like GDP directly or to sum up its seasonally adjusted components. This choice is usually driven by subjective motives or practical convenience. In the case of seasonal adjustment with chain-linked data one might...

To address the relationship between innovation and competition we jointly estimate the opportunity, production, and impact functions of innovation in a simultaneous system. Based on Swiss micro-data, we apply a 3-SLS system estimation. The findings confirm a robust inverted-U relationship, in...

The availability of affordable institutional child-care is increasingly discussed as an important determinant of the labour force participation of parents, particularly of mothers. This paper examines the impact of child-care costs on the employment rates of mothers with children younger than 15...

The deepening of the debt crisis in the euro area is due to three systemic causes which national governments are not able to overcome on their own. First, being members of a monetary union euro states cannot reverse the rise in public debt (caused by the financial crisis 2008) through...