Set against the background of a rapidly consolidating financial sector, this paper explores the main forces that are driving this process. Acknowledging that the search for scale and scope economies is one of them, the paper emphasises that the empirical evidence in support of such economies is...

This paper observes that de-industrialisation has been mostly relative in Europe, with industrial value added and employment shrinking in relative terms, but industrial value added growing in absolute terms - at least until recently. Qualitatively, this relative de-industrialisation has been the...

The development of production, prices and employment in the EU electrical industry between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s is analysed in order to test the hypothesis that the competitive pressure from low-income countries has led to the observed decline of the employment share of low-skilled...