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This paper examines the relationship between the environmental and economic performance of firms in the European paper manufacturing industry. It initially discusses possible functional relationships between environmental and economic performance rooted in different theoretical frameworks and links these to recent empirical and theoretical analyses of the Porter hypothesis. Following this, it reports the results of an empirical study carried out in the European paper industry. Findings fit better with ‘traditionalist’ reasoning about the relationship between environmental and economic performance, which predicts the relationship to be uniformly negative. In particular they confirm the necessity for a more differentiated view of the Porter hypothesis. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the relationship between economic inequality and the distribution of votes among political parties, namely political polarization and fracturalization. Economic inequality is captured by the Gini index, whereas new measures of political polarization and fracturalization are offered. This is the first paper to calculate political polarization and fracturalization indices by a methodology previously used for ethnic, religious and linguistic polarization and fracturalization. Empirical analysis uses data for 17 European countries and for three decades, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. It is shown that increased income inequality increases political party polarization and reduces fracturalization and that political party polarization decreases with increased GDP per capita. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Harvey (1988) , the forecasting ability of the term spread on economic growth is due to the fact that interest rates reflect investors' expectations about the future economic situation when deciding their plans for consumption and investment. Past literature has used ex post data on output or consumption growth as proxies for their expected value. In this paper, we employ a direct measure of economic agents' expectations, the Economic Sentiment Indicator elaborated by the European Commission, to test this hypothesis. Our results indicate that a linear combination of European yield spreads explains a surprising 93.7\% of the variability of the Economic Sentiment Indicator. This ability of yield spreads to capture economic agent expectations may be the actual reason for the predictive power of yield spreads about future business cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forecasting the economic policy uncertainty in Europe is of paramount importance given the ongoing sovereign debt crisis. This paper evaluates monthly economic policy uncertainty index forecasts and examines whether ultra‐high frequency information from asset market volatilities and global economic uncertainty can improve the forecasts relatively to the no‐change forecast. The results show that the global economic policy uncertainty provides the highest predictive gains, followed by the European and US stock market realized volatilities. In addition, the European stock market implied volatility index is shown to be an important predictor of the economic policy uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Regional Accounting Matrix including Environmental Accounts (RAMEA) is the Regional version of a ‘National Accounting Matrix including Environmental Accounts’ (NAMEA), an environmental accounting system that combines economic and environmental accounts into a single framework, which is useful for the evaluation and comparison of the integrated economic–environmental–social performance of regions. Presenting the first results of compiling and applying a RAMEA in three European regions: Emilia-Romagna (Italy), Noord-Brabant (the Netherlands) and Małopolska (Poland), this paper analyses the difficulties in achieving internationally comparable regional models. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the neighboring effects of Internet adoption as measured by the percentage of firms with their own website in the European regions. This is the first study that explicitly analyzes the role played by spatial effects to explain website adoption for the European case. A set of instruments and techniques commonly used in the spatial econometrics framework is employed to test the hypothesis that proximity matters when explaining Internet adoption by firms. Results show that firms in physically adjacent regions register a similar degree of Internet adoption, confirming the presence in this context of positive spatial dependence. Nevertheless, the spatial effects detected are mainly constrained by national borders. Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, population density, sectoral composition, and education are positively related to geographic distribution of Internet adoption in the enlarged European Union. In addition, regional disparities in Internet adoption were found to be less important than territorial inequalities in GDP per capita. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of articles, books, etc., used in cross-referencing the topic of 'Economic Relations.' Some of the articles, are: A Reappraisal of U.S.-U.S.S.R. Trade Policy, Nepal's Recent Trade Policy, The Coal Situation in Europe and Future Prospects, Leadership and Economic Growth, etc.

This paper examines the relationship between credit constraints—proxied by the investment‐to‐cash flow sensitivity—and firm‐level economic performance— defined in terms of labor productivity—during the period 2009–2016, using a sample of 22,380 manufacturing firms from 11 European countries. It also assesses how regional institutional quality affects productivity at the level of the firm both directly and indirectly. The empirical results highlight that credit rationing is rife and represents a serious barrier for improvements in firm‐level productivity and that this effect is far greater for micro and small than for larger firms. Moreover, high‐quality regional institutions foster productivity and help mitigate the negative credit constraints–labor productivity relationship that limits the economic performance of European firms. Dealing with the European productivity conundrum thus requires greater attention to existing credit constraints for micro and small firms, although in many areas of Europe access to credit will become more effective if institutional quality is improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether different types of FDI are asymmetrically affected by corporate taxation. We classify investment projects according to several characteristics such as the general motivation for FDI, the type of business activity, or the degree of internationalisation of the multinational firm. Subsequently, we analyse how local taxes influence the number of German outbound investments in European countries. The analysis reveals significant asymmetries with regard to tax effects: vertically integrated investments are more sensitive to host-country taxation than horizontal FDI; larger tax rate elasticities are estimated if business activities are considered highly mobile; and in accordance with profit-shifting considerations, subsidiaries of more internationalised companies are less tax responsive to host-country taxation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of the literature on fiscal decentralization has tended to stress that the greater capacity of decentralized governments to tailor policies to local preferences and to be innovative in the provision of policies and public services, the greater the potential for economic efficiency and growth. There is, however, little empirical evidence to substantiate this claim. In this paper we examine, using a panel data approach with dynamic effects, the relationship between the level of fiscal decentralization and economic growth rates across 16 Central and Eastern European countries over the 1990–2004 period. Our findings suggest that, contrary to the majority view, there is a significant negative relationship between two out of three fiscal decentralization indicators included in the analysis and economic growth. However, the use of different time lags allows us to nuance this negative view and show that long-term effects vary depending on the type of decentralization undertaken in each of the countries considered. While expenditure at and transfers to sub-national tiers of government are negatively correlated with economic growth, taxes assigned at the sub-national level evolve from having a significantly negative to a significantly positive correlation with the national growth rate. This supports the view that sub-national governments with their own revenue source respond better to local demands and promote greater economic efficiency [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of the relationship between internal migration rates at NUTS 2 level and economic developments. For five European countries, several hypotheses were tested on three groups of economic variables: general business cycle indicators, financial variables as well as variables reflecting more structural labour market developments. The empirical analysis is based on first differences of all variables. Although some support was found for all of the hypotheses tested but one, the main conclusion is that there is a stable relationship between GDP per capita and internal migration that is highly similar across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological modernization has been widely adopted by western politicians as a means to achieving a balance between continued economic growth and sustainable development. Countries with consensual forms of government, such as Germany, seem to be leading the field in developing such policies. Thus, it might be expected that it will be the industries within these states that reap the win–win benefits of greater attention to the environment. This paper explores the reality of these expectations through semi-structured interviews with business managers in three EU countries: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Contrary to expectations the attitudes of German managers to the environment did not differ significantly from their French and British counterparts. Differences in behaviour were perceived as a product of stricter environmental regulation in Germany rather than any deep-seated changes in outlook. Ecological modernization was not seen as an answer to Germany's current economic predicament. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The calculation of purchasing power parities and quantity comparisons for a given year provides interesting information about the relative importance of countries. However, it is necessary to make these estimates annually in order to enable users to apply these parities for international comparison of annual data expressed in national currency. The paper deals with the problems related to merging spatial comparisons and temporal volume and price movements for the countries of the European Community. For these countries full information was collected in 1975 and in 1980, whereas in the intermediate years some price data were collected and price indices at a detailed level have also been collected. First the theoretical problems of consistency between the spatial results and temporal indices are discussed. Because no immediate consistency can be obtained, several methods are proposed to achieve consistency, by estimating one unique set of spatial and temporal indices. The available information for the period 1975–80 has been used in order to test the numerical differences between two sets of parities and price indices over time. Besides theoretical reasons for inconsistency, it is also necessary to take into account errors in the price observations or in the price indices. The results presented in the paper should be considered as provisional and further work will be undertaken to obtain better insights into the inconsistency between these sets of data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many researchers, policy makers, and food activists view Short Food Supply Chains (SFSC) as attractive levers for improving farm income and the sustainability of farming systems. However, the empirical evidence documenting the association between SFSC participation and farm economic performance has been mixed. In this study, through a meta‐analysis using a logistic regression, we identify key factors to explain differences between studies that find better economic performance in SFSC and those that do not. Our meta‐analysis consists of 48 studies published in English and French from 2000 to 2022 that examine the economic performance of farms engaged in SFSC. Based on far more empirical evidence than previous reviews, we find that the relationship between SFSC participation and farmer income remains ambiguous. More specifically the findings indicate that the reported effect of SFSC on a farm economic performance varies depending on location and the indicator used to capture the economic performance of farms. Studies conducted in Europe are more likely to report higher farmer income as are studies that use profit satisfaction metrics rather than measures of gross or net income. We also emphasize the need to interpret the reported results cautiously because few are based on causal inference methods. Furthermore, the very few studies that account for selection bias often do so with inadequate corrections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose exploiting the term structure of relative interest rates to obtain estimates of changes in the timing of a currency crisis as perceived by market participants. Our indicator can be used to evaluate the relative probability of a crisis occurring in one week as compared to a crisis happening after one week but in less than a month. We give empirical evidence that the indicator performs well for two important currency crises in Eastern Europe: the crisis in the Czech Republic in 1997 and the Russian crisis in 1998. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most empirical studies find that country effects are larger than industry effects in stock returns, although industry effects have gained in importance recently. Our results support the dominance of country effects relative to industry and common effects in the EMU equity markets in the 1975–2001 period. However, there is an increasing importance of industry effect relative to country effect in the 1990s. In fact, industry effects is similar in magnitude to country effect in the post-euro period. The evolution of the ratio of country to industry effect is explained by the decrease in the cross-sectional variance of interest rate movements across EMU countries. Thus, there is evidence that nominal convergence has reduced the differences between national equity markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer evidence that interest rate spreads on syndicated loans to corporate borrowers are economically significantly smaller in Europe than in the United States, other things equal. Differences in borrower, loan, and lender characteristics do not appear to explain this phenomenon. Borrowers overwhelmingly issue in their natural home market and bank portfolios display home bias. This may explain why pricing discrepancies are not competed away, though their causes remain a puzzle. Thus, important determinants of loan origination market outcomes remain to be identified, home bias appears to be material for pricing, and corporate financing costs differ across Europe and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents documentation of several books and papers related to the regional growth of Europe. "European Yearbook," A record of European organization and integration compiled under the auspices of the Council of Europe. Regional Development, Economic Growth And Employment in France. A discussion of the excessive concentration of industry around the cities, particularly Paris, of the effects this concentration is having on the nation's economy, and of what may be done to change the trend. "Continental France," Facts and figures on the political and economic state of France with some information on foreign trade and special inducements for foreign investors.

This study examines potential explanations for performance differences among multinational enterprises (MNEs). The research variables, diversification strategy and degree of internationalization, involve basic elements of firms' strategy: range and relatedness of products, and relative emphasis on foreign versus domestic operations. The sample included the 100 largest MNEs from the U.S. and Europe. Diversification strategy was significantly related to MNE performance, extending Rumelt's seminal research to international business. Degree of internationalization was also significantly related to MNE performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice so far has indicated that there is a sensitive relationship that exists between social and economic subsystem of sustainable development, therefore this research suggests comparison of the states of these two subsystems as a new conceptual frame which is essential for strategic conceptualization of development. The research pointed out a rather visible collision between the achieved degree of economic and social development in the countries of South Eastern Europe in respect to Germany and France, which were taken into consideration as two of the most developed countries in the European Union and in the entire world. The indicators which are given in this research point to the necessity of further scientific and practical consideration of strategic conceptualization of relationship between economics and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This publication presents a report on the world economy as of June 2012. It focuses on the crisis in the Eurozone as an important factor in the downgrade of global economic forecast. Information is offered on projections of economic indicators up to 2016 for developed economies in North America, Europe and Asia.

An article is presented that reports on the economic performance and conditions of member states of the European Union (EU) outside of the zone for the euro in 2009. The article discusses the role of these EU countries in the global economy, describing their capital and credit during the 2008-2009 global financial crisis and recession. Economic indicators in the euro area provide information on recessions in countries such as Latvia and Lithuania with respect to growth rates, employment, and inflation. Information is also provided on public finance, economic bubbles, and debt.

Unlike most prior literature in finance and economics, this article focuses on events in the political economy and examines the integration of European equity markets over the 1988 through 2002 period using two innovative techniques that assess how the level of integration in equity price indices changes over time. The results show that notwithstanding the rising interdependencies between the European and US equity markets during the mid- to late 1990s, the long-run integrative relationships governing the European markets strengthen only in the late 1980s. This evidence suggests that despite several years of political willingness by European leaders to integrate economies, the equity markets only responded to the Delors Report (1989) and the Strasbourg Declaration (1989) that the European Economic Community would move towards European Monetary Union, but they provided little positive long-run response to subsequent developments pertaining to European Monetary Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Résumé. Les données de six vagues d'enquětes du Panel européen des ménages (1996-2001) collectées dans onze pays indiquent que les travailleurs à bas salaire de l'Europe du Sud sont, contrairement à ceux de l'Europe du Nord, nettement moins satisfaits de leur emploi que les travailleurs à salaire élevé. En calculant par approximation la satisfaction au travail pour évaluer la qualité de l'emploi, les auteurs montrent que, si bas salaire ne rime pas nécessairement avec emploi de mauvaise qualité, les travailleurs de certains pays sont néanmoins doublement pénalisés: ils sont mal rémunérés et ont un travail de mauvaise qualité. Selon les auteurs, ce dualisme des marchés du travail en Europe correspond à des approches différentes au niveau national du compromis entre flexibilité et sécurité, cette dernière devant ětre privilégiée au plan politique pour améliorer la qualité de l'emploi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses on the measure used to gauge poverty in the U.S., Europe and other developing countries. It discusses that the present official measure of poverty in the U.S. is flawed and both, the poverty threshold and measurement of available resources should be improved. It reports that European countries provided with sufficient social aid but they face a technical problem of relative poverty threshold. Also mentioned are the levels of economic development in developing and underdeveloped countries.

Half a century has passed and Turkey is no further toward achieving EU membership. Under the mandate of the Barcelona Declaration, EU–Turkish industrial tariffs will be abolished, whilst agro-food protectionism remains largely intact. Consequently, the direct impacts from a hypothetical EU accession scenario will be concentrated in agro-food sectors, whilst their share of economic output in Turkey implies ‘secondary’ macro impacts. To this end, a computable general equilibrium (CGE) framework is employed to quantitatively reassess full Turkish accession. Unlike previous CGE studies, agriculture, fishing and food sectors are disaggregated, whilst significant advancements to the ‘standard’ model code are incorporated to capture the vagaries of agricultural factor, input and product markets. In addition, a realistic ‘baseline’ scenario is constructed including ‘up to date’ trade and domestic agricultural policy reforms prior to Turkish entry to the EU. The results show that trade-led gains in Turkey are moderated due to tariff liberalisation prior to EU entry, whilst Turkey receives significant budgetary transfers from the CAP budget, which are ‘mirrored’ as EU-27 costs. With additional migration effects, Turkish (EU-27) production possibilities fall (rise), whilst real income per capita rises (falls). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's recent economic growth has been driven by an apparent acceptance by the Chinese government of many of the key insights of Hayek's economic and social thought. Current Chinese economic policies stand in stark contrast to those being pursued by the EU and many European countries, where interventionist policies of the kind Hayek predicted would lead to relative impoverishment and declining freedom are being pursued. The long-term consequence of these two trends is likely to be the economic dominance of China over Europe in the present century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the macroeconomic forecasting performance of several univariate and new multivariate alternatives used to explain variation in the growth rate of annual Gross National Product (GNP) over time for five European countries and discusses how the presence of comovements among a collection of variables affecting forecasting is ambiguous. A multivariate model can be an appropriate framework to assemble all the information about the national economies. With a dynamic factor model, one can explicitly look for common trends and common cycles among the GNP data of different countries. An attempt to build a large multivariate model for a much extended GNP data set seems the natural alternative to study comovements among the national economies. However, one problem may arise a priori. A much larger number of countries considered with only 40/50 annual observations per country implies a great chance of considering spurious common cycles when looking for common trends in a large collection of countries showing an asymmetric business cycle behavior.

Discusses political achievements made in Europe in 1999. Institutional matters relating to the European Commission and Parliament; Exploration of issues relating to economic and monetary union (EMU) and employment; Development of a European security identity; Acceleration of enlargement; Dialogues about the problem of economic governance; Process of reform begun by European institutions.

Using the natural laboratory of 18 post-communist Central and Eastern European countries, this article presents a basic model for democratic transition, specifically testing two alternative explanations for the degree of citizen satisfaction with the performance of their fledgling democracies: (1) virtues of omission, which include bad actions from which the state refrains, namely violations of individual human rights, and (2) virtues of commission, which include positive state actions, in particular actions enhancing economic well-being. The findings clearly indicate that, during the transition period citizens' sense of the condition of human rights is consistently more important than are perceived economic prospects as predictors of democratic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the history of European economic growth during the period 1450-1750. According to the new school of development history, the critical period when different parts of the world set off along contrasting paths of economic growth occurred between 1450 and 1750, three centuries which witnessed the emergence and consolidation of European world economy based upon the capitalist mode of production. The evolution of trade and commerce under this old international economic order created conditions for development and underdevelopment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A striking feature of the new history of development is the absence of systematic statistical underpinning for several of its basic hypotheses. An important omission is its failure to measure the economic significance of intercontinental trade. External trade formed only a small share of economic activity. Around 1780-1790 when something like 4 percent of Europe's gross national output was exported across national frontiers, perhaps less than 1 percent would have been sold to Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the southern plantations of the young U.S.

The article focuses on typologies and evidence that serve as a guide to economic growth in Europe during the nineteenth century. There has also been increased reliance on comparative methods by historians seeking to achieve a cross-fertilization of explanatory ideas. For both purposes it is desirable, for the first purpose essential, that any historical generalizations called into aid should be not only true of several particular instances but also should be very widely applicable. It could be harmfully misleading if what looked to be proclamations of universal relationships turned out to be no more than accounts of one or two highly individual cases, disguised in the language of generality. All the chief schemes expounding alleged universalities in the history of economic growth have received plenty of criticism, both appreciative and hostile, but it is doubtful whether they have often been starkly confronted by the question whether the evidence they use is comprehensive enough to provide a secure foundation of genuine history for edifices as vast as they have grown to be. They have been challenged on grounds of unclarity or inappropriateness in their basic concepts, or because they have been inaccurate on some specific points, or because some particular case may be more convincingly interpreted by postulating a different chain of causation.

The late 1980s and early 1990s appear to be a political watershed in European history. Despite many uncertainties about the fate of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, many observers see the turn of this decade marking the triumph of liberal capitalism over state socialism. Proposed policy changes in response to ongoing integration efforts within Western Europe and to international pressures for freer markets are potentially the most profound legislative shifts to affect rural areas since the 1930s. If implemented, these changes could dramatically affect the structure of agriculture and rural communities throughout Western Europe and the rest of the world. A sustainable agricultural policy would seem to offer better prospects than either the present policy track or a free market policy for thwarting the tendencies of economic and demographic concentration. It should promote a more decentralized economic development through the creation of backward and forward linkages within agriculture and between agriculture and other sectors.

Deals with enlargement of the European Union by ten countries in transition. Macroeconomic indicators for the Eastern and Central European countries; Evidence for policy convergence worldwide; Structural dimensions of transition in the form of principles of good government at the public and corporate levels; Macroeconomic framework for policy sustainability.