European Economic Integration

The United Kingdom's departure from the European Union on 1 January 2021 introduced substantial new administrative, customs, and regulatory burdens on exporters across the continent. For Poland-the UK's fourth largest export market and a country with a deeply embedded trade surplus in bilateral goods exchange-Brexit represented an inflection point of considerable commercial significance. Yet the data that has accumulated since the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) came into force tells a counterintuitive story: Polish exports to the UK not only survived the transition but accelerated, reaching EUR 18.5 billion in 2024 and sustaining a goods trade surplus of nearly EUR 12.5 billion-the widest bilateral surplus Poland maintains with any major non-EU trading partner (PAIH, 2025; GUS DBW, via HandelPolska.pl). This article examines the structural, commercial, and operational factors that account for this resilience. It argues that three mechanisms were decisive: the structural shift in export composition from automotive components to food products, the mobilisation of the Polish diaspora in Britain as a demand driver, andcritically-the adoption of process automation tools by Polish SMB exporters that enabled them to absorb the administrative costs of post-Brexit compliance without proportional increases in overhead. Documented evidence from Polish firms implementing automation solutions (Digital Development, 2025) is used to illustrate how operational efficiency at the firm level translates into competitive advantage in a higher-friction trade environment. The findings have implications for the broader literature on trade resilience, non-tariff barrier adaptation, and the role of firm-level digital maturity in sustaining export performance under institutional disruption.

This study focuses on Albania and North Macedonia during the 2020-2024 period, offering a comparative analysis of their EU accession paths and examining how the European Union's conditionality mechanism functions. With the introduction of the new negotiation methodology, which places the "fundamentals" namely the rule of law, judicial independence, and fundamental rights at the core, the research evaluates both countries' progress dynamics through indicators such as crossing the IBAR threshold and alignment with the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Albania, through judicial reform and full compliance with the CFSP, succeeded in opening the "Fundamentals" cluster in 2024. North Macedonia, however, did not fulfill the constitutional amendment condition, causing its accession process to come to a standstill. The study argues that EU conditionality produces meaningful results only when accompanied by internal political agreement and institutional strength. Freedom House democracy scores reveal that stable normative convergence depends on solid domestic reform rather than external pressure alone. Building on this insight, the study develops a hybrid explanation of EU enlargement based on the interaction of threshold effects, signal alignment, and institutional agency. The findings show that conditionality in the Western Balkans operates unevenly, with reform sustainability tied closely to institutional capacity.

The transition to electric vehicles (EVs) represents a crucial step toward achieving global sustainability and climate goals. However, high upfront costs, inadequate infrastructure, and limited access to affordable financing remain significant barriers to widespread EV adoption, particularly in developing countries like India. This research investigates the role of diverse financing mechanisms in accelerating EV adoption, analyzing global best practices and contextualizing them within the Indian ecosystem. The research is exploring and analytical in nature. Content Analysis is done through thematic coding of financing models (e.g., subsidies, leasing, public-private partnerships (PPPs)). To examine the relationship between government subsidies and EV adoption, linear regression model adopted drawing data from the IEA Global EV Outlook 2024 and Bloomberg NEF Electric Vehicle Outlook 2023. To test the stated hypothesis, a Chi-Square test of independence was conducted using a hypothetical contingency table consisting of 140 observations. The table categorizes EV adoption levels (High vs. Low) against the availability of financing mechanisms (Available vs. Not Available). The research utilized academic databases including EBSCO, ProQuest, and Google Scholar for source discovery and filtering, ensuring high-quality and citation-indexed literature the study. The paper also evaluates the role of PPPs in expanding EV charging infrastructure, offering insights into how risk-sharing and coinvestment models can support long-term ecosystem growth. Findings indicate that direct subsidies and tax incentives significantly improve EV affordability and market penetration, especially when paired with public awareness and stable policy frameworks. Innovative financing models like Battery-as-a-Service (BaaS) and leasing reduce ownership barriers, making EVs accessible to a broader demographic. Moreover, the strategic involvement of private financial institutions, through green financing and credit enhancement tools, has the potential to unlock large-scale infrastructure development. Despite promising developments, challenges persist. These include fragmented regulatory policies, regional inequalities in financing access, and a general lack of financial literacy among potential EV buyers. To overcome these issues, the study recommends harmonizing state and national incentive programs, expanding alternative credit mechanisms, and promoting financial education related to EV ownership. Overall, the research underscores the critical role of financing as a catalyst in EV adoption. A coordinated, inclusive, and innovation-driven financing ecosystem is essential for achieving sustainable mobility goals, particularly in emerging markets like India.

Economists have long argued that the best way to fight climate change is to levy a price on carbon emissions, either via a global specific carbon tax or a competitive worldwide market for emission permits. This price should be Pigouvian and equal the present value of current and future global warming damages and be the same throughout the world. Despite decades of climate negotiations, very little success has been achieved in implementing such first-best climate policies. This disappointing cleavage between theory and practice poses three important challenges to economists. First, global warming is the only truly global externality and therefore policy makers are confronted with huge free riding problems and countries choosing to protect jobs in fossil-based industries at home in favour of protecting the planet (such as the United States under President Trump). International climate agreements do not cover all countries of the world. So if only some countries price carbon, this will depress the world price of coal, oil and gas and thus some of the cuts in emissions will be offset by higher emissions elsewhere. These carbon leakage problems can be overcome to an extent by border tax adjustments or so-called "climate clubs" that punish third non-participating countries with a stiff trade tariff of around 5% . Second, most politicians have a tendency to procrastinate and postpone carbon pricing so that their successors have to deal with the unpopular task of fighting climate change. Politicians also prefer the "stick" to the "carrot" and therefore choose to give huge renewable energy subsidies and green R&D subsidies instead of pricing carbon. Although such policies work eventually in locking up more carbon in the crust of the earth, they waste public money and induce rent seeking. Furthermore, both postponing climate policy and subsidising renewable energy induces coal, oil and gas producers to exhaust their reserves more quickly and thus to accelerate carbon emissions and global warming. These Green Paradox effects thus add on to the carbon leakage effects. As far as financial markets are concerned, there is a risk of stranded financial assets to do with irreversible investments if policy makers suddenly take credible and effective action to fight global warming. Third, the energy transition towards a carbon-free economy requires huge technological innovations. This special issue collects some of the papers that were presented at the conference "Combating Climate Change, Lessons from Macroeconomics, Political Economy and Public Finance" held April 22-23 2016 at Tinbergen Institute Amsterdam and that deal with these types of challenges.

This essay critically examines the role of courts in balancing free trade and environmental protection within the EU legal order, using proportionality review as the primary analytical framework. While proportionality offers a flexible, case‑specific tool for reconciling competing interests, it is subject to significant limitations: a systematic judicial bias in favour of trade, the difficulty of addressing cumulative environmental harms through individual case review, and an insufficient embrace of the precautionary principle. The essay argues that courts must give greater weight to environmental values, recognise the limits of case‑by‑case balancing, and integrate the constitutional obligations of Articles 11 and 191(2) TFEU more robustly. Without such evolution, trade will likely continue to prevail over environmental protection, undermining the legitimacy and sustainability of the EU legal order in an increasingly interconnected world.

Shift the debate from "Can Europe afford Ukraine?" Ukraine's accession to the EU is not primarily blocked by political goodwill but by economics and institutional constraints. The challenge is that Ukraine is simultaneously one of Europe's largest agricultural producers, a country requiring extensive reconstruction after the war, a potential major recipient of regional development funds and a candidate whose accession requires unanimous approval from all EU member states.

How to help Ukraine to became part of European family world.
Helping Ukraine move closer to the European Union is mainly about building institutions, trust, mutual cooperation and long-term social stability. The most effective support combines state reform with direct support for ordinary people.
Some of the most important directions are:
Strengthening rule of law, as EU integration depends heavily on independent and transparent low fulfilment, predictable income and taxation, education format that recognise in other European institutions. That’s why cooperation is needed in helping institutional training, partnerships on educational and business levels and direct interaction between ministries and municipalities. It’s important step to progress let (invite, attract) graduates from European institution to work in Ukraine and Ukrainian graduates and professors to experience scholarship in abroad.

We examine global economic dynamics under learning in a New Keynesian model in which the interest-rate rule is subject to the zero lower bound. Under normal monetary and fiscal policy the intended steady state is locally but not globally stable. Large pessimistic shocks to expectations can lead to deflationary spirals with falling prices and falling output. To avoid this outcome it may be necessary to suspend normal policies and replace them by aggressive monetary and fiscal policy that guarantees a lower bound on inflation.

For a linear model with multiple rational expectations equilibria (REE) we discuss the set of possible REE. Solutions include (i) locally unique minimal state variable solutions. taking an AR(I) form and (ii) continua of solutions which may depend on sunspots. We analyze the convergence of econometric learning to the different REE. There exist cases with more than one stable AR(l) solution. It is also possible for a continuum of solutions to be stable. but this property is not robust to overparametrization. An application is developed, and it is suggested that the exhibited phenomena may arise in applied macroeconomic models.

European Environmental Policy underwent a process of liberalization from 1973 to 1992, shifting from so-called "command-and-control" instruments such as technical standards, to "market-based instruments" such as tradable pollution permits. This transition is usually depicted as a move from "dirigist" to "neoliberal" instruments. This paper will nuance this reading by first contesting the "dirigist" interpretation of the "command-and-control" system, arguing that the concept of "neocorporatism"
more accurately captures how standards have been negotiated and implemented.
Second, instead of reducing the global shift to a process of neoliberalization, this article will underscore the role of the US model, in addition to a dynamic of globalization.
Third, it will argue that all instruments—whether "command-and-control" or "market-based"—can be used either to promote environmentalism or to protect polluters. In short, what matters is less the instrument than its purpose, whether it be to free markets, protect the environment, promote local industrial interests, or all three simultaneously.

As of early 2026, discussions on Ukraine’s prospective membership dominate international coverage of the European Union’s evolving borders. That is somewhat peculiar, given that the website of the European Commission lists1 as many as 10 countries as “candidates for membership.” With the exception of Türkiye— whose accession remains politically unlikely—the remaining candidates emerged from the disintegration of the former socialist bloc and exhibit substantially lower per capita incomes than any state previously admitted to the EU. The largest and poorest among them is war-torn Ukraine. This paper reviews the historical trajectory of the EU’s enlargements using data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators. Drawing on conceptual tools from world systems analysis, it assesses the economic feasibility and political willingness of the EU to address the development challenges associated with further enlargement. The study also evaluates the likely forms of integration
that may emerge between the EU and its current candidate countries.

Currency crises of the past decade highlighted the importance of balance-sheet effects of currency crises. In credit-constrained markets such effects may lead to further declines in credit. Controlling for a host of fundamentals, we find a systematic decline in foreign credit to emerging market private firms of about 25% in the first year following currency crises, which we define as large changes in real value of the currency. This decline is especially large in the first five months, lessens in the second year and disappears entirely by the third year. We identify the effects of currency crises on the demand and supply of credit and find that the decline in the supply of credit is persistent and contributes to about 8% decline in credit for the first two years, while the 35% decline in demand lasts only five months.

We are most grateful to Jorge Duran, R. Dos Santos Ferreira, L. Kaas and two anonymous referees for detailed and stimulating comments on these earlier versions. We also wish to thank (without implicating) R. Boucekkine, D. de la Croix, J.H.Drèze and participants at various seminars for thoughtful questions and comments. Financial support from the IAP IV and ARC programmes is gratefully acknowledged.

We study the relation between cognitive ability and the decision to invest in stocks using the recent Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The survey has detailed data on wealth and portfolio composition of individuals aged 50+ in 11 European countries and three indicators of cognitive abilities: mathematical, verbal fluency, and recall skills. We find that the propensity to invest in stocks is strongly associated with cognitive abilities, for both direct stock market participation and indirect participation through mutual funds and investment accounts. We also find that stockholding increases with social interactions, intention to leave a bequest, and is negatively associated with health status.

Before 1992 mortgage interest in Italy was fully tax deductible up to 3,500 Euro (7,000 for two cosigners). In 1992-94 the government implemented a series of tax reforms whose ultimate effect was to cancel the relation between the after-tax mortgage rate and the marginal tax rate. Using data from the 1989-2002 Survey of Household Income and Wealth we test if the cancellation of incentives has affected the sensitivity of the decision to borrow and the amount borrowed with respect to the marginal tax rate. Regression analysis and difference-in-differences estimates indicate that tax considerations have not affected the demand for mortgage debt, neither at the extensive nor intensive margin.

This paper examines country-level determinants of venture capital investment (VCI) across 22 European economies from 2013 to 2020. We combine Invest Europe VCI totals with 14 indicators from the Global Innovation Index (GII) and classify each indicator into quintile tiers. Using oneway ANOVA with Tukey HSD post-hoc tests, we assess whether VCI differs systematically across tiers for each determinant. VCI is highly concentrated: France and Germany form a persistent upper tail, followed by the Netherlands, while Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece sit at the lower end. Eleven of fourteen indicators display significant between-tier differences in VCI: business environment, government effectiveness, gross expenditure on R&D, human capital and research, ICT access, ICT use, knowledge & technology outputs, knowledge creation, patent applications, PCT applications, and university–industry collaboration. By contrast, creative goods & services, ICT services exports, and political/operational stability do not discriminate VCI within this European sample. Results are robust to alternative binning, log-VCI transformation, and exclusion of the largest ecosystems. We interpret the patterns as consistent with VCI concentrating where institutional quality is strong, innovation inputs are deep, digital readiness is advanced, and knowledge/IP outputs are abundant. The findings offer actionable priorities for policy aimed at strengthening SME finance ecosystems, while acknowledging the study’s associative design and the aggregation of VCI across stages and sectors.

This paper is part of the Polarization and Conflict Project CIT-2-CT-2004-506084 funded by the European Commission-DG Research Sixth Framework Programme. A different paper by the same authors circulated under the same title. We liked the title better than the paper; so we scrapped the second and kept the first. Thanks to Alberto Alesina, Bill Easterly and other participants to the Political Economy Summer Meetings of the NBER. We are also thankful to Antonella Cuteri and Alessio Farcomeni for valuable research assistance on R programming language. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

This paper is the first to explore how ambiguity arising from incomplete information about probabilities (a.k.a. Knightian uncertainty)-an altogether different construct from risk or economic policy uncertainty-affects cross border bank lending (claims and syndications). Using high-frequency stock return data from 20 countries to compute a newly defined measure of ambiguity, our results show a significant positive relationship between heightened ambiguity in source countries and increased cross-border bank lending. The relationship remains robust after controlling for macroeconomic factors. The results suggest that banks respond to domestic market ambiguity by restructuring their business portfolios and increasing their financial credit exposures abroad. This is consistent with theoretical hypotheses around banks' ambiguity aversion. On the other hand, in line with most prior findings in existing literature, a volatility measure of risk is found to have a negative effect on cross-border bank lending. By isolating the effect of home country ambiguity from commonly adopted measures of risk or broadly defined uncertainty, our study provides an important insight for policymakers and banking supervisors navigating the complexities of global finance in an increasingly uncertain environment.

The volume addresses the political-economic relations between the EU and Italy starting from the formation of the EMS in 1979 to the euro. With the establishment of the EU, member states have experienced a drastic loss of economic and political sovereignty, now directed by Brussels and the ECB. In the case of Italy, the pro-European approach does not comply with the 1948 Constitution which advocated a decisive role for the State in the political and economic sphere of the country. An analysis of the entire process shows how Italy has undergone significant sacrifices and a sharp reduction in its economic and industrial weight to the advantage of export-led economies (Germanic area).

I investigate the imposition of a horizontal technical barrier to trade (HTBT) in a symmetric, crosshauling duopoly. Tari¤s and subsidies are ruled out, but, in the absence of a mutual recognition agreement, it is possible for governments to impose HTBTs, so long as …rms apply di¤erent technologies. If …rms are …rst movers, this possibility may induce them to avoid technical collaboration, in order to tempt governments into creating local monopolies, except where spillovers and R&D e¤ects are high. This exacerbates the costs of regulatory protection, compared to standard models without R&D or spillovers.

We analyze the relation between tax enforcement, aggregate output and government revenue when imperfectly competitive firms evade a specific output tax. We show that aggregate output decreases with tax enforcement. Government revenue increases with enforcement when the tax is low. When the tax is high, government revenue is either inversely U-shaped or decreasing with enforcement.

Celem projektuw którym uczestniczą także zespoły eksperckie z Bułgarii, Czech, Estonii, Słowacji, Słowenii i Węgier, przygotowujące własne raporty krajo wejest ocena zdolności poszczególnych krajów kandydackich (w naszym przy padku Polski) do integracji europejskiej. Ocena ta (monitoring) dokonywana jest z określonej przez nasz zespół i stale doprecyzowywanej perspektywy. Poszczególne raporty dotyczą pięciu podsta wowych obszarów, a mianowicie: gospodarki, rolnictwa, społeczeństwa, prawa i polityki. Najważniejsze wydarzenia danego roku (w obecnym raporcie jest to rok 1999) w tych pięciu obszarach dotyczące integracji europejskiej są omówione w pierwszym rozdziale. W kolejnych raportach specjalny rozdział poświęcony jest wybranemu zagadnieniu, które ma kluczowe znaczenie dla przebiegu integracji. Rozdział ten przygotowywany jest przez wybitnego specjalistę z danej dziedziny, którego stały zespół EU-monitoringu zaprasza do współpracy w opracowaniu dane go raportu. W tej edycji jest to rozdział drugi, dotyczący problematyki polityki re gionalnej, autorstwa prof. dr hab. Jacka Szlachty z SGH. O ile rozdział pierwszy stanowi zasadniczo przegląd wydarzeń w danym roku, to rozdział trzeci jest próbą spojrzenia na przebieg procesu integracji europejskiej Polski w dłuższym okresie, ale z pewnego punktu widzenia, który przyjmujemy kie rując się wynikami analizy wydarzeń (i obrazujących je wskaźników) z danego roku. W tym raporcie takim pryzmatem jest zagadnieniejakości rządzenia. Dla prowadzenia rzetelnego monitoringu podstawowe znaczenie ma dobór wskaźników. Poprzez kolejne edycje raportu stopniowo wypracowaliśmy zestaw takich wskaźników. Ich poziom rozpatrujemy i komentujemy w poszczególnych 1. Marszałek Sejmu -M. Płażyński (2000) zwrócił jednak słusznie uwagę, że: "Problem nie polega na tym, że Polska nie ogłasza swojego stanowiska w sprawie reformy wewnętrznej UE, ale na tym, że nic nie wskazuje, by takie stanowisko miała".

Защо много хора имат усещането, че у нас "няма съдебна реформа по същество"? 1.Това усещане не е необосновано. То идва от няколко реални фактора: Първо, фокусът на готвещата се съдебна реформа е върху структурни, а не върху кадрови промени. "Същността на реформата" обаче е именно кадровата политикаподбор, атестация, дисциплинарна отговорност, професионални стандарти. Това почти не се засяга от никоя политическа сила.

economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.

Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre -including this research content -immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

What are the cyclical properties of U.S. state and local government fiscal policy? The budget surplus of local and, in particular, state governments is procyclical, smoothing disposable income and consumption of state residents. This happens over both short-and medium-term horizons. Procyclical surpluses are the result of strongly procyclical revenues, and weakly procyclical expenditures. The budgets of trust funds and utilities are procyclical. Federal grants are procyclical, exacerbating the cyclical amplitude of state level income movements; although they smooth the idiosyncratic component of shocks to state output. State and local budget surpluses are affected by balanced budget rules at the short-but not at the medium-term horizon. Further, budgets are less procyclical in conservative states.

We characterize the …rm's optimal contract for a manager who faces costly e¤ort decisions and whose ability to generate pro…ts for the …rm changes stochastically over time. The optimal contract is obtained as the solution to a dynamic mechanism design problem with hidden actions and persistent private shocks to the manager's productivity. When the manager is risk-neutral, the optimal contract often entails a simple pay package that is linear in the …rm's cash ‡ows. Furthermore, the power of incentives (i.e., the sensitivity of pay to performance) typically increases over time, thus providing a possible justi…cation for the practice of putting more stocks and options in the pay packages of managers with longer tenure in the …rm. Building on the insights from the risk-neutral case, we then explore the properties of optimal contracts for risk-averse managers. We …nd that risk-aversion reduces, and in some cases can even reverse, the pro…tability of compensation schemes whose power of incentives increases with tenure.

The United Kingdom automotive market has undergone a structural transformation of unprecedented velocity. Chinese-manufactured vehicles, representing a mere 1.3 per cent of new UK car registrations in 2020, have risen to approximately 15 per cent in the first quarter of 2026-with a Chinese model, the Jaecoo 7, recording the highest sales volume of any vehicle in the UK market for the first time in history. This paper examines the structural, geopolitical, and commercial forces driving this transformation; critically evaluates the current policy and industry response; and proposes an original business solution framework designated the Domestic Automotive Reinvention Strategy (DARS). The DARS framework integrates supply chain localisation, technology partnership models, consumer value repositioning, and public-private investment mechanisms to provide a coherent, actionable pathway for UK automotive sector survival and long-term competitive reinvention in an era of Chinese manufacturing dominance.

Expectations play a crucial role in modern macroeconomic models. We consider a New Keynesian framework under a behavioral model of expectation formation and under rational expectations. Contrary to the rational model, the behavioral model predicts that inflation volatility can be lowered if the central bank reacts to the output gap in addition to inflation. We test the opposing theoretical predictions in a learning-to-forecast experiment. In line with the behavioral model, the results support the claim that output stabilization can lead to less volatile inflation.

This paper reports the framework, method and main findings of an analysis of cultural milieus in 4 European countries (Estonia, Greece, Italy, and UK). The analysis is based on a questionnaire applied to a sample built through a two-step procedure of post-hoc random selection from a broader dataset based on an online survey. Responses to the questionnaire were subjected to multidimensional analysis-a combination of Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis. We identified 5 symbolic universes, that correspond to basic, embodied, affect-laden, generalized worldviews. People in this study see the world as either a) an ordered universe; b) a matter of interpersonal bond; c) a caring society; d) consisting of a niche of belongingness; e) a hostile place (others' world). These symbolic universes were also interpreted as semiotic capital: they reflect the capacity of a place to foster social and civic development. Moreover, the distribution of the symbolic universes, and th...

How does implementing harsh economic reforms influence voting behavior? And how do the patterns of political support change over the course of transition? We analyze these issues using data from a sequence of 11 opinion surveys conducted in the Czech Republic between 1990 and 1998. We find that while voters' ideological position and some socio-economic characteristics, such as age and education, tend to have a stable impact on voting behavior over time, economic outcomes, such as employment status, income and unemployment, only affect political preferences in the later stages of the transition. This is consistent with the predictions of the theoretical literature on political constraints during transition – as the uncertainty about reform's outcomes dissipates, constituencies of winners and losers emerge. The winners are the young, educated, high-wage earners and w orkers employed in de novo private firms. The losers, on the other hand, are the elderly, low-skilled and low-w...

Migrants' political attitudes are often different from those of their compatriots at home. We utilize a unique dataset on votes cast by Czech and Polish migrants in national elections in their home countries to examine three alternative explanations of migrant voting behavior: political re-socialization, economic self-selection and political self-selection. The results indicate that the political preferences of migrants change significantly in the wake of migration as migrants adapt to the norms and attitudes prevailing in the host country. There is little evidence that migrants' political attitudes are due to self-selection with regard to either their pre-migration political attitudes or economic characteristics.

Transfer prices are administered charges for intra-firm transfers of factors of production. For a multinational firm, transfer prices for international transfers provide the means to redistribute costs and increase global profits given variations in national tax and profit repatriation policies. Local regulation of a subsidiary may thus be necessary to limit the welfare costs of strategic transfer pricing. Prusa (Journal of International Economics, 1990, 28, 155-172) characterizes the welfare-maximizing regulations for a monopoly subsidiary that induce the firm to report transfer prices truthfully. We show, however, that it can be more efficient to implement regulations that encourage the firm to misrepresent its true transfer costs.

To address this question we examine the liquidation policy of the German privatization agency. The theoretical part develops a dynamic model of optimal liquidation under incomplete political insulation of the privatization agency. We explore how external political interference affects its liquidation policy and derive testable implications for the distribution of liquidation decisions and privatization prices. The empirical part uses micro data on 1,804 privatization contracts and 1,097 liquidation decisions to verify the model predictions. The data conÞrm the view that political liquidation constraints are an important determinant of privatization outcomes.

The paper evaluates the impact of technology together with resource endowments and economies of scale on international competitiveness in OECD countries. Knowledge capital stocks are obtained by cumulating R&D expenditure. Results show that competitiveness is determined not only by the R&D activity of the representative firm, but also by the size of domestic industry as well as economy wide stocks of knowledge, indicating the presence of local externalities. Further results points to the importance of economies of scale in R&D internal to the firm and of investment for introduction of embodied technical progress. Finally, the R&D impact differs between high-and low-tech industries as well as among countries. -(/ FODVVLILFDWLRQ F12, F14, O32 .H\ZRUGV international competitiveness, technology gap, knowledge stock, R&D, disembodied and embodied technical change

De início podemos afirmar, Hitler está morto; Himmler está morto; Göring está morto. E, mesmo assim, em maio de 1945, ainda haviam generais, coronéis e fanáticos (lobos solitários) que se recusaram a acreditar que a guerra havia acabado, que suas forças estavam dizimadas, lideranças mortas e a ideologia que alimentava seu íntimo, havia sido vencida, fatos são mentem. Lutavam em turmas ou bolsões isolados, defendiam ruínas e repetiam "slogans" como se o "Führer" fosse ressuscitar a qualquer momento, "O Poder é nosso!", é a negação em estado puro. Mas está no poder abraçado a patologia de que pode determinar o destino da sociedade "corre" por uma última cartada desesperada, agarrar-se ao que resta, o último nó da teia, a crença que o "CredCesta", poderá salvar o grupo. Passam anos e a cena se repete-só que com sotaques diferentes "revolucionários"-"teocráticos"-"socialistas" seguem a mesma toada. Na Venezuela, Maduro foi capturado em janeiro de 2026 e hoje responde a processo em Nova York. A democracia chavista acabou? Não, segundo Delcy Rodríguez, porém, democraticamente soltou centenas de presos políticos, reabriu relações com Washington e já posa ao lado de executivos de petróleo. Enquanto isso, grupos exigem seu retorno como se ele fosse o último símbolo de uma ideologia que se esfacela e respira para sobreviver. No Irã, a morte de Ali Khamenei deixou um vácuo que o filho Mojtaba não se sabe como, tenta preencher, vivo/morto-ninguém confirma. Mas a narrativa "xiita" segue, falam em "unidade para derrotar o inimigo". Entretanto, aparece apenas na propaganda do grupo que controla a mídia, semelhante a democracia togada que bem conhecemos. O regime como última cartada fecha o Estreito de Hormuz, tentando estrangular a economia mundial, tal como aqueles comandantes nazistas que juraram lutar até o último homem, até quando. Para eles importa que ideologia permaneça; afinal o carisma do fundador já está sepultado, assim como o sonho da "picanha e cerveja". Em Cuba, Fidel já se foi há tempos, Raúl Castro, puxa os fios por trás das cortinas e Miguel Díaz-Canel faz o papel de presidente formal. Com o corte do petróleo venezuelano e Russo, a ilha vive blecautes e uma crise continua. Díaz-Canel admite conversas com os EUA-conduzidas, claro, pelo "líder" Raúl, e doutro lado seu opositor mais íntimo, imigrante, fugitivo da perseguição, prisão e morte, hoje, Chefe, "Marco Rubio". É a mesma dança: o regime autoritário perde o pilar central, mas os burocratas tentam negociar uma saída que preserva o essencial do poder. O que esses casos mostram é uma lição antiga e incômoda: regimes que dependem de um líder supremo ou de uma narrativa ideológica ficam frágeis quando esse pilar desaba. Sobram então os "comandantes regionais"-uns pragmáticos que mudam de discurso para salvar o pescoço, outros ideológicos que resistem até o fim. Às vezes surge uma transição real; outras, apenas uma troca de máscara, com o autoritarismo se reinventando para continuar dando as cartas. Hegel distingue três momentos: doutrina, crença e ritual; assim fica-se tentado distribuir a ideologia nestes elementos como um complexo de ideias (teorias, convicções, crenças, métodos de argumentação), distanciando-se da realidade (materialismo) a cada dia e cada passo, vivendo apenas "em si" e "para si". No final, a história não termina com a morte (ou prisão) do grande chefe. Ela continua na teimosia humana de não admitir derrota, na vontade de manter o controle sobre "a quem a sociedade deve servir". Seja em 1945 ou em 2026, o espetáculo se repete.

The presented paper will focus on the extent of requirements of EU law for nullity or ineffectiveness of contracts in specific areas linked to functioning internal market: competition law, including agreements restricting competition, abuse of dominant position, merger control and state aid, and rules of public procurement. The scope of EU-law-based nullity is quite limited and only Art. 101(2) TFEU provides expressed nullity of agreements restricting competition. In the case of abuse of dominance, nullity of contract constituting abuse of dominant position can be drawn from the principle of effectiveness of EU law. Validity or nullity of contracts violating suspension clause in merger control regime are assessed in two periods-before decision on merger and after decision of the Commission. State aid regime cannot rely on EU-law-based nullity of contracts that violate EU state aid rules. Finally, public procurement rules appear the most complex in this context since they operate with the "right" of the contracting authority to terminate contract and power of revision authority to declare "ineffectiveness" of illegally awarded contract, and therefore revision of directives is suggested.

The Effects of Changing Shopping Hours Regulations in the Netherlands * A 1996 change in shopping hours regulations in the Netherlands provides an opportunity to study the effects of timing constraints on total time spent in shopping, working, and other activities as well as the timing of these activities. We develop a simple structural model to make predictions about the effects of imposition and relaxation of a timing constraint on time use patterns, and utilize time diary data from 1995, 1997, 1999, and 2000 to examine time use patterns by demographic group before and after the change. In addition to a change in the timing of shopping, we find a non-negligible increase in the total time spent shopping.

W opracowaniu przedstawiono wyniki analizy istotnych zmian w architekturze międzynarodowych relacji gospodarczych, które nastąpiły w związku z pandemią COVID-19 oraz wojną w Ukrainie. Skutkiem tych wydarzeń było przerwanie łańcuchów produkcji i dostaw, co ujawniło wysoki poziom uzależnienia Unii Europejskiej (UE) od niektórych partnerów handlowych na świecie. Państwa Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej (EŚW) musiały zmierzyć się również z bezprecedensowym napływem migrantów przymusowych. Stopniowo budowana autonomia strategiczna UE poprzez uniezależnienie podmiotów europejskich od tracących zaufanie parterów spoza Unii oraz tworzenie aliansów przemysłowych, a także presja migracyjna stanowią kolejne wyzwania dla słabszych finansowo i gospodarczo państw EŚW. Stąd też celem prezentowanego badania jest uchwycenie zmian pozycji państw EŚW na tle UE wobec przesunięć zachodzących w architekturze nowych międzynarodowych relacji gospodarczych. Dokonano w związku z tym analizy statystycznej głównych wskaźników państw EŚW dotyczących pomocy publicznej, wymiany handlowej z państwami spoza UE oraz migracji. Przeprowadzone badanie pozwoliło ustalić, że państwa EŚW w różny sposób zareagowały na zmiany występujące w geopolityce światowej. Mimo że na zakres interwencji wpływ miały przede wszystkim kolejne wieloletnie perspektywy finansowe, to kryzys energetyczny w istotnym stopniu ukształtował też główne cele polityki publicznej. Na wymianę handlową towarami z państwami spoza UE, a także na migrację do państw EŚW największy wpływ miały zarówno brexit, jak i wojna w Ukrainie, podczas gdy handel usługami pozostał w zasadzie niepodatny na te wydarzenia. Na podstawie przeprowadzonej analizy można stwierdzić, że po ponad 20 latach względnie stabilnego rozwoju i wzrostu gospodarczego w ramach UE państwa EŚW powinny zacząć natychmiast identyfikować swoje interesy krajowe z zasadami i politykami unijnymi, a także-nie zapominając o wyłącznych kompetencjach UE w niektórych obszarach-realizować je przy pomocy dostępnych narzędzi.

We propose that donating profits to charity may improve firm performance through reduced moral hazard and increased effort in incomplete contract environments. This proposition is tested and confirmed in an incomplete contract principal-agent laboratory experiment where principals' profits are donated to charity. The results show that both principals and agents have higher earnings in treatments where principals are working on behalf of a charity. Only in the charity treatments do agents respond positively to the effort levels suggested by the principals, and do higher requested levels of effort result in higher principal earnings.

We study an economic setting in which a principal motivates a team of strategic agents to exert costly effort toward the success of a joint project. The action taken by each agent is hidden and affects the (binary) outcome of the agent's individual task in a stochastic manner. A Boolean function, called technology, maps the individual tasks' outcomes to the outcome of the whole project. The principal induces a Nash equilibrium on the agents' actions through payments that are conditioned on the project's outcome (rather than the agents' actual actions) and the main challenge is that of determining the Nash equilibrium that maximizes the principal's net utility, referred to as the optimal contract. Babaioff, Feldman and Nisan suggest and study a basic combinatorial agency model for this setting, and provide a full analysis of the AND technology. Here, we concentrate mainly on OR technologies and on series-parallel (SP) technologies, which are constructed inductively from their building blocks -the AND and OR technologies. We provide a complete analysis of the computational complexity of the optimal contract problem in OR technologies, which resolves an open question and disproves a conjecture raised by Babaioff et al. In particular, we show that while the AND case admits a polynomial time algorithm, computing the optimal contract in an OR technology is NP-hard. On the positive side, we devise an FPTAS for the OR case and establish a scheme that given any SP technology, provides a (1 + )-approximation for all but an ˆ -fraction of the relevant instances (for which a failure message is output) in time polynomial in the size of the technology and in the reciprocals of and ˆ .

This textbook examines European Union migration policy as a central domain of governance shaped by hybrid threats affecting political stability, social cohesion, and economic resilience. It provides an interdisciplinary and policy-oriented analysis of migration processes, integrating perspectives on immigrant integration, gender equality, ecological communication, labor mobility, and security.
Structured into six interconnected chapters, the book combines theoretical frameworks with practical tools, including case studies and applied exercises. It explores legal and institutional mechanisms for integrating migrants, the role of gender security in socioeconomic development, intercultural and environmental communication strategies, EU legislation on free movement, approaches to combating illegal migration, and the regulation of labor mobility in the context of technological change.
By situating migration governance within broader hybrid challenges, the textbook offers readers a comprehensive understanding of the EU’s migration architecture and equips students, researchers, and practitioners with analytical and practical competencies to engage with migration policy in contemporary European and global contexts.

A rapidly rising carbon tax leads to faster extraction of fossil fuels and accelerates global warming. We analyze how general equilibrium effects operating through the international capital market affect this Green Paradox. In a two-region, two-period world with identical homothetic preferences and without investment, the global interest rate falls and the Green Paradox weakens. With investment or a relatively more impatient oil-importing region, the Green Paradox may be strengthened because the future oil demand function shifts downward or because the interest rate rises. If the oil-importing region is very much more patient than the oil-exporting region, the Green Paradox may be reversed but in our calibrated model the effects are tiny. With exploration and endogenous initial oil reserves, a future carbon tax lowers cumulative oil extraction in partial equilibrium. If the boost to current oil extraction is weakened, strengthened or reversed in general equilibrium, so is the fall in cumulative extraction. A partial and general equilibrium welfare analysis of a future carbon tax, both for full and partial exhaustion, is given.

This paper presents an econometric analysis of inflation from a Post Keynesian perspective using quarterly data from 2002 to 2024 for the United States, including the most recent period of inflation after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I evaluate the continued relevance of the comprehensive Post Keynesian model of inflation using a reduced form equation that incorporates both the aggregate demand-augmented wage-cost markup equation and the wage growth equation which is robust in explaining inflation. The robustness of the model is tested by incorporating different measures of labor market slack, wages, and inflation. The paper finds that the comprehensive model is not robust for the period 2002 to 2024 even when alternative measures for wages, unemployment, and inflation are utilized. This discrepancy arises because the negative relationship between unit labor costs and inflation, observed in the updated model, proved non-robust upon the inclusion of control variables for energy costs and imports. After employing the Prais-Winsten estimation to account for persistent serial correlation, the revised model aligned with the sign conventions of the original Atesoglu wage-cost markup equation. Specifically, while the coefficient for unit labor costs turned positive, it failed to reach statistical significance. Finally, I discuss potential factors for the decrease in the magnitude and significance of the coefficients in the aggregate demand-augmented wage-cost markup model for the period 2002 to 2024 as well as the pass through of wage growth to broader inflation measures.

This study investigates the determinants of credit standards among commercial banks in the Philippines, a critical aspect of financial stability and monetary policy transmission. Utilizing data from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas' Senior Bank Loan Officers' Survey and macroeconomic indicators from 2009 to 2024, a stepwise multiple regression analysis was conducted on 640 observations. The objective was to identify significant regressors of both overall and specific credit standards. Findings reveal that inflation rate and past-due ratio (PDR) lead to significant tightening of credit standards, with PDR exerting the greatest influence. Conversely, GDP growth rate, capital adequacy ratio (CAR), and return on equity (ROE) lead to significant easing. Collateral requirements and loan covenants were identified as the most regressed specific credit standards. This research offers valuable insights into bank lending behavior, providing policymakers with empirical evidence for managing credit supply, mitigating financial risks, and ensuring banking system stability.