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The economic developments experienced within the countries of European Union (EU) in the recent years have reported impacts on road safety levels, especially in serious injuries and traffic fatalities. In order to support the road safety strategies of the EU countries, it is essential to investigate the association of road safety levels with economic, social and demographic factors and finally comparatively evaluate the performance of each country. This paper aims at analyzing the road safety performance of EU-23 countries over a decade (2005–2014) considering their socio-economic and demographic background. For doing so, two distinctive models were applied, in particular, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and DEA-Cross Efficiency Model (DEA-CEM), both suitably adapted to the road safety particularities. Moreover, the concept of road safety evaluation is performed by using comparable road safety indicators, namely, mortality rate and fatality risk. The results of this study contribute to the decision/policy making agenda from the perspective of evaluating road safety performance levels by using short-term and long-term road safety targets. Additionally, an unbiased ‘picture’ of the countries’ road safety performance over a period of 10 years is provided, accompanied with information on the intra-period countries’ efficiency of their road safety targets. The proposed intra-period analysis has useful practical and methodological implications since it is able to expose the evolution of road safety levels among the countries, besides a static overall picture. Finally, this study offers valuable insights on the cross-evaluation of road safety levels among the EU countries by considering a target-setting approach for each of them before and during a turbulent financial period for Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent turbulent times have spurred a response by policy-makers to engage in a number of labour market reforms to enhance economic resilience and flexibility. Amid discussions about the most efficient ways to conduct such reforms, whether individually or simultaneously, we still lack evidence on the cross-country interactions and international interdependencies that may strengthen or weaken economic responses within an economic union. This paper deals with three policy tools – unemployment benefits, activation policies and the tax wedge, and demonstrates that they dissipate across open economies. We document evidence of both positive and negative policy spillovers among European economies and carry out a counterfactual of coordinated policies which prove to be needed for some but not other policy variables. We find that coordination strengthens macroeconomic responses to labour market policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts of sustainability and sustainable development (SD) are often used by policy-makers, stakeholders and the private sector, as a ‘selling point’ for their agendas and goals. Thanks to the wide, but also self-interpretive definition, the concepts allow various actors to make related pledges without necessarily undertaking any significant changes to their existing policies, strategies and actions. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse the meaning of and approaches to sustainability and SD, which are being adopted and/or reformulated in the newly emerging bioeconomy policy debate of the European Union (EU). Understanding these concepts is crucially important given the growing importance of and adherence to bioeconomy-based policies and strategies by both individual EU Member States and the EU as a whole. The way bioeconomy policies perceive sustainability and SD as concepts will have profound implications not only on a practical level for policy implementation, but also on a conceptual level and for theoretical discourses surrounding sustainability and SD. The policy and narrative analyses illustrate that the current EU bioeconomy policy leans strongly towards prudentially conservationist, utilitarian and instrumental approaches to SD, as well as towards weak sustainability. We argue that a balance between environmental, social and economic dimensions – as introduced in the Brundtland report – is missing within the EU bioeconomy policy framework, since economic dimensions and concerns prevail over environmental and social dimensions. In the light of possible negative consequences of biomass production, we foresee an urgent need to define and broaden the scope of bioeconomy, as well as to include environmental and social concerns and safeguards. To tackle the shared challenges and constraints modern societies face today, a broader definition of sustainability needs to be adopted within the EU bioeconomy policy framework. Issues such as social justice, fairness and equity, social and environmental safeguards and local traditional knowledge in various concerned sectors should be taken into consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need to balance austerity with growth policies has put government efficiency high on the economic policy agenda in Europe. Administrative reforms that boost the internal efficiency of bureaucracy can alleviate the trade-off between consolidation and public service provision. Against such a backdrop, this paper constructs (and makes available) a novel reform indicator to explore the determinants of public administration reforms for a panel of EU countries. The findings support political-economic reasoning: An economic and fiscal crisis is a potent catalyst for reforms, but a powerful bureaucracy constrains the opportunities of a crisis to promote reform. Furthermore, there is some suggestive evidence for horizontal learning from other EU countries, and for vertical learning associated with a particular type of EU cohesion spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper opts for the stochastic frontier methodology to investigate the impact of structural reforms on profit efficiency in the banking industry of four new European Union Member States over the period 1999–2003. Our findings suggest that reforms in the banking market are of vital importance for profitability, as they assert a positive impact on profit efficiency, whereas reforms in the non-bank financial sector appear to hinder profit efficiency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper looks at the impact of the UK joining the Euro on compatibility between the UK and the Euro zone. We construct a theoretical model to capture such effects, and then estimate the model using data from the period 1980–1999 (the period covering the existence of the ECU and the Euro). Particular attention is paid to the actual dynamics of the system and the important roles of monetary and fiscal policy. We find that the dynamic path of the UK and Euro members is stable and that UK monetary policy is in line with that of its Euro zone neighbours in a way that would be close to that expected if the UK were already a member of the Euro zone. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the context of the current policy debate on the reform of European fiscal rules, there is wide consensus on the need to place more attention on debt–GDP ratios. Proposals have been made to alleviate fiscal pressure on Member States with relatively low public debts. The present paper gives support to this view. Economies with high public debt–GDP ratios are shown to experience larger price deviations after a fiscal expansion. These results are derived in a model, calibrated to euro area quarterly data, with capital accumulation, flexible prices and wealth effects in the presence of an independent monetary authority. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper a structural macroeconometric model for the Euro area is presented. In contrast to the multi-country modelling approach, the model relies on aggregate data on the supra-national level. Due to non-stationarity, all equations are estimated in error correction form. The cointegrating relations are derived jointly with the short-run dynamics, avoiding the finite sample bias of the two-step Engle Granger procedure. The validity of the aggregated approach is confirmed by out-of-sample forecasts and several simulation exercises. Several shocks are considered, and their implications for Euro area growth and inflation are examined. In particular, shocks to US growth, the nominal interest rate and the exchange rate of the Euro against the US dollar are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Enlargement of the EU with 10 Central and Eastern European Countries is a major item on the EU’s policy agenda. Assessing the economic consequences of the accession to the internal market is not obvious. This paper provides a new method to quantify the impact of the accession. The assessment is based on a gravity equation, estimated for 16 industries. The estimations exploit the fact that the current EU members already operate in a Single Market since 1992. The estimations provide information on the barriers, at the level of industries, that the Single Market program succeeded to remove. This is used to assess the industry-level impact of enlargement, for the current EU members and for the accession countries.This approach yields different estimates for the impact of accession to the internal market for the different industries and different countries. The impact of accession to the internal market is notably large in Agriculture, Textiles, Trade Services, Transport Equipment, Non-metallic Minerals and Food Processing. Moreover, the aggregate excess trade within the internal market is comparable to what other studies find. The shock of accession to the internal market is plausibly largest for the accession countries. For the current members of the EU the upcoming enlargement likely has the largest impact for Austria, Greece and Germany. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]