The article shows that reservations in Europe against Turkey's future membership are really groundless. A Muslim nation already was a member of the EU: Algeria. When Algeria was still a colony, it joined the EU (then: European Economic Community) on January 1st 1958 as a French "Departement",...

In this paper, we examine the exchange rate volatility in selected new EU Member States (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) and candidate countries (Croatia, Romania, Turkey) using TARCH model and daily data from the period May 2004 – December 2006. Besides the volatility estimation,...

“Being rich in energy resources – a blessing or a curse” finds that an energy resource curse plagues many EU supplier states. This in turn directly affects Europe’s energy supply security and threatens to engulf Europe in unwanted hostilities at home and abroad. The study addresses seven...

Since the 1987 Single European Act, the European Union has deepened its integration process. In the case of the determination of the common external tariff, deeper integration implies that the tariff reflected union-wide preferences. If integration is still shallow, though, the observed tariff...

The book, which is available on-line, evaluates the performance of the EU accession countries in the field of social security; disabled people and social inclusion; youth, family and generation policy matters, health policy and veterinary policies. The overall positive evaluation of the maturity...

This paper examines the social opportunity cost of a hypothetical public project in Australia and compares these values with the cost of the project as measured by factor prices. Since 2001, the Australian taxation system has included an ad valorem tax, the Goods and Services Tax, however...

This article analyses the competition between cash and payment cards against the backdrop of the dual role of central banks - as issuers of cash and as institutions with a mandate to foster the efficiency of payment systems in general. It is argued that this dual role results in a number of...

US poverty is much higher than poverty in Europe when a relative poverty measure is used. Using an absolute poverty measurement method, the picture looks different: poverty in some European countries is higher. This paper estimates poverty rates for all the countries of the (old) EU and the USA...

Die Unterschiede im Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftssystem zwischen den USA und Europa waren zwar immer ausgeprägt, gewinnen aber seit dem Zusammenbruch des gemeinsamen Gegenmodells in der ehemaligen Sowjetunion und in Osteuropa und dem Lissabon-Prozess zunehmend an Bedeutung. Letztens hat diese...

Tests for causality and rationality in the coffee futures market were carried out using data from the New York Market. Tests of causality indicated that futures prices strongly influence variations in spot price eight weeks or more to maturity. However, beginning seven weeks to maturity there...