Phare support to SME development has mainly consisted of technical assistance and advisory services to national institutions, support to SME policy and legislative development and financial support for SME development. Progress has been made in tackling problems inherited from the past, as well...

This ex post evaluation addresses the EU/EC’s pre-accession assistance provided to the twelve countries that acceded to the European Union as part of the ‘fifth wave’ of EU enlargement, i.e. Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia...

Dem Beitritt zur Europäischen Union (EU), den zahlreiche Länder anstreben, wird mit einiger Verzögerung die Einführung des Euro folgen. Schon jetzt stellen sich daher zwei grundsätzliche Fragen: Erstens, ist die Europäische Zentralbank (EZB) auch dann mit den derzeit gegebenen...

For more than ten years, formerly centrally-planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have endeavoured to redress their environmental problems. For most CEE countries, the record of accomplishments is mixed. One of the least successful areas of reform has been cleanup and restoration...

This paper considers the education of the labour force based on an analysis of trends in and the relationships between job polarization and skills mismatch. Both job polarization and skills mismatch have become topics of increasing interest, but relationships between the two have been relatively...

The principles of budgetary completeness and transparency are indispensable elements of fiscal surveillance in the European Union. Within this context, this study deals with the leading question to which extent budgetary policy in the ten new EU member states (NMS) can be regarded as transparent...

Based on the review of literature and our own conceptual considerations, we show that absorption problems regarding the EU Structural Funds may be important. The central topic of our paper is the question of how to measure the administrative capacities of particular Candidate Countries for...

Following up on a previous paper by the same author on the contribution of ICT capital to growth and labor productivity in Poland 1995-2000, this paper extends the study to eight transition economies: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia. The paper shows that...

Using the border effect approach, our paper examines the influence of the legal framework quality of the Central and Eastern European countries on international trade. This approach offers an evaluation of the borders' impact on trade. A market is fragmented when actual trade differs from the...