This article evaluates the extent to which the establishment of the Andean Free Trade Zone (AFTZ) has led to an improvement of intra-regional trade, as promised by open regionalism, without reducing extra-regional trade. Open regionalism is a dynamic process in which economic agreements serve as intermediate steps towards integration with the world economy. The calculations of ex post income el...

Legal certainty is a fundamental principle which contributes in the rule of law. According to some authors this principle is an “imperative necessity for the European Union”. Indeed the European case-law recognized the principle of legal certainty. One the one hand, through the European Court of Justice in 1962 in the Bosch judgment. As well, the principle of legitimate expectations – which is ...

We estimate the speed of income convergence for a sample of 196 European NUTS 2 regions over the period 1985-1999. So far there is no direct estimator available for dynamic panels with strong spatial dependencies. We propose a two-step procedure, which involves first spatial filtering of the variables to remove the spatial correlation, and application of standard GMM estimators for dynamic pane...

In April 1994, t he European Pharmacopoeia Commission set up a new procedure for the "Certification of Suitability of Monographs of the European Pharmacopoela" to deal with the changing requirements of the licensing authorities and the growth of international trade, notably as regards raw materials to be used in the manufacture of medicines. This procedure was the result of extensive collaborat...

This paper aims to give an idea of the policy context in the European Union for lifelong learning, a clear definition of the principle of lifelong learning and an outline of the lifelong learning framework in the European Commission's Communication: making a European area of lifelong learning a reality. The paper provides a case study of one candidate country – Hungary to illustrate how the pri...

The goal of this research is to present the concept of convergence club within the European Union members, starting from the hypothesis that an overall convergence cannot be identified because of the high output disparities between countries and between regions. For the analysis, the concept has been used as a method of regression based on a convergence test that supposes an innovative decompos...

This paper uses model-based recursive partitioning to study economic growth in the 255 European Union NUTS2 regions over the period 1995–2005. The starting point of the analysis is a human-capital augmented Solow-type growth equation similar in spirit to Mankiw et al. (1992). Initial GDP and the share of highly educated in the working age population are found to be important for explaining econ...