Current Accounts in Europe: Implications of the External Imbalances for the Future of the Common Monetary Policy

The paper discusses the seriousness of current account imbalances in the last few decades in Europe, with a particular focus on the European Monetary Union. A closer look at the development of current accounts in European economies suggests the existence of some serious structural problems that might jeopardize economic performance of single countries, but even more importantly, of the entire monetary union. Although current account positions have been subject of numerous research projects till now, scarce interest has been offered regarding specifically the situation in the member states of the euro area and in the euro candidate countries. This lack of interest could be justified among others with the myopic conviction expressed in the literature that current account positions become irrelevant in a monetary union. Instead, there are conceptual reasons to be worried about external imbalances in a currency area, and particularly, in the current as well as potentially enlarged EMU

Does Membership on the UN Security Council Influence IMF Conditionality?

We investigate whether elected members of the United Nations Security Council receive favorable treatment from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), analyzing panel data on the level of conditionality attached to (a maximum of) 314 IMF arrangements with 101 countries over the period of 1992 to 2008. We find a negative relationship: Security Council members receive about 30 percent fewer conditions attached to the loans that they receive from the IMF. We conclude that conditionality is softer for these countries because the major shareholders of the IMF desire influence over the Security Council

Globalization, Economic Freedom and Human Rights

Using the KOF Index of Globalization and two indices of economic freedom, we empirically analyze whether globalization and economic liberalization affect governments' respect for human rights using a panel of 106 countries over the 1981-2004 period. According to our results, physical integrity rights significantly and robustly increase with globalization and economic freedom, while empowerment rights are not robustly affected. Due to the lack of consensus about the appropriate level of empowerment rights as compared to the outright rejection of any violation of physical integrity rights, the global community is presumably less effective in promoting empowerment rights

Financial Liberalization, Growth, Productivity and Capital Accumulation: The Case of European Integration

In the present contribution, we concentrate on the process of financial liberalization in a specific context of European economic and monetary integration. We implement de facto and de jure measures of financial liberalization and find that formal aspects of financial openness generate a strongly positive impact on economic growth and its sources, productivity growth and capital accumulation. Moreover, there is evidence of a positive contribution to the process stemming from the EU membership, while no substantial effect comes from the euro adoption. Finally, we investigate the effects from financial integration on country groups within the EU

Optimal Aging with Uncertain Death

This paper extends the theory of optimal aging and death (Dalgaard and Strulik, 2010, 2013) towards uncertain death. Specifically, it is assumed that at any age the probability to survive depends on the number of health deficits accumulated. At the expense of less analytical tractability the model provides a formal description of aging as conceptualized in modern biology, i.e. as an inherently stochastic process according to which the timing of death of a person is not determined by his or her age but by the number of accumulated health deficits. The stochastic model basically confirms the earlier deterministic model with respect to its predictions on the association between income and life-expectancy across countries

Follow the Sun! How Investments in Solar Power Plants in Sicily can Generate High Returns of Investments and Help to Prevent Global Warming

Germany could have reached Kyoto protocol obligations earlier if German solar investments would be relocated to Sicily. Additional benefits of emission savings and energy production should rise up to 72%. Nevertheless German solar power plants 2008 counted for 20 % of the financial benefits through support mechanisms EEG for renewable energies while the share at produced green energy was not more than 4,8%. The system seems absurd from an economical view, but is adopted in many other countries. Firstly, the paper will analyse general economic theories to underline the importance of financial supports for renewable energies and why policy maker can justify the subsidies for selected technologies through social costs effected by carbon exhaust. Secondly, place does matter and physics are the limit: the following chosen approach for expected final yield shrinks the additional benefits of the theoretical relocated south solar investments to +37%. Thirdly, the conclusions give political recommendations for the design of further subsidies of solar energies in Europe

Services Sectors' Concentration: The European Union, Greece, and the New Economic Geography

The aim of this article is to investigate services sectors' concentration in the European Union based on employment data and to disentangle the sector-specific developments and influential factors over time. We find that only the financial intermediation, retail trade and water transport sectors are subject to an increasing level of concentration over time. Moreover, we can detect a strong specialization tendency in the sectors of tourism and public administration for the Greek economy. Implementing a two-way fixed effects model, we find that knowledge spillovers as well as externalities arising from technological similarities appear to be highly significant in explaining services' concentration patterns for the European Union. Technological differences as a reason for services' concentration only appear to have been important in the period prior to the Single European Market Enactment. Further evidence is found for the relevance of factor intensity in explaining concentration of non-market services

Cross-Country Heterogeneity and Endogeneity Bias in Life Satisfaction Estimations - Macro- and Micro-Level Evidence for Advanced, Developing and Transition Countries

The past literature found evidence for the presence of endogeneity issues due to individuals' heterogeneity and omitted time-varying variables in the relationship between income and life satisfaction on the micro-level for the UK (Powdthavee (2010)). The aim of the present contribution is to put these results in a broader context and to investigate the role of cross-country heterogeneity and income endogeneity in estimations on life satisfaction for sub-samples of advanced, developing and transition countries. The paper is innovative in merging this methodology with a multi-country setting, particularly considering transition and developing countries. Instrumenting for income, we find that cross-country heterogeneity is associated with a significantly lower estimate for the income effect, whereas controlling for endogeneity bias delivers significantly higher estimates. This points to a negative bias in the OLS estimate, and thus approves previous literature's findings. Capturing endogeneity appears to be essential in studies on life satisfaction. The negative bias apparently is highest for the sub-sample of transition countries and lowest for advanced countries. Most of the macro- and micro-level impacts are in line with the previous literature