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There is a widely held hypothesis that the advanced world faces severe ethical and moral crisis which manifests into at least two observable trends: Firstly, there is a downward trend in marriages, secondly, an increasing trend of one-person households has been also registrable. But, there is also anew hypothesis arguing that because of the increasing welfare (for instance in the United States), more and more person

While there is some optimistic judgement over the end of the 2008 financial and economic crisis – not to mention those voices advocating that the Great Recession was not really so great (Van Ours, 2015) –, there is a certain level of uncertainty encoded into the fragile recovery. If for no other reason than the European integration seems to suffering from non-convergence in many aspects between the core and the perip

In this short post, we are to provide support to the argument that the degree of fiscal decentralisation affects the innovation milieu of a country through influencing the closeness among relevant stakeholders (public, private and third sector). Closeness, corruption, innovation milieu To this end, we have two considerations: (i) a more decentralised structure is closer to the society and thus it promises more fiscal

There is a widespread consensus among mainstream economists that more labour market flexibility (like in the US) is more likely to be associated with better economic performance because of the more fertile ground for innovation and productivity compared to the welfare states of Europe where labour market has a stricter feature (See Chart 1). As Sapir noted: “The stricter the employment protection legislation of a mod

There is nothing worse than not-receiving a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences because the candidate died too early. By and large, this was clearly what happened to Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod, who was born 124 years ago this day, on 13 February 1900. His intellectual legacy embraces a wide range of issues starting from smaller scale problems (e.g. whether credits tend to affect perversively the general price level, Se

Economic scholars, pundits and practitioners are becoming more and more aware of the fact that foreign direct investment can be ranked with one of the basic drivers of development through various channels (i.e. knowledge and technology transfers, triggers of R&D and innovation activities etc.). There is no gainsaying the fact that the relevance of FDI, let it be inflowing or outflowing, has gained even more subst