The establishment of the European Common Market has involved the free movement not only of capital and goods, but also of persons and services. The principles of free movement also apply to the health care sector, i.e. they allow for the free incorporation of health care providers and the cross-border delivery of services. Since the 1970s, the European Union (EU) has passed numerous regulations...

In 2004 the European Union is due to incorporate 10 new members, mostly from the Central and Eastern European Countries (CECs). Trade between the EU and CECs currently falls well short of that between EU countries, and if we assume this pattern reflects both tariffs and a resource cost due to regulatory differences, then 1997 trade patterns would imply such costs are 7-15% on trade between the ...

Ireland's economy has made an outstanding progress in the last 40 years goingfrom a relatively poor country to the present EU average per capita income. The Irish economy was deliberately opened around 1960, after decades of following an import-substitution industrialisation policy. The Irish government established an agency for attracting FDI and decided to apply for membership in the EEe. Bef...

In this paper we analyse the impact of financial liberalization and reforms on the banking performance in 17 countries from CEE for the period 2004-2008 using a two-stage empirical model that involves estimating bank performance in the first stage and assessing its determinants in the second one. From our analysis it results that banks from CEE countries with higher level of liberalization and ...

hepatitis c can be cured and even eradicated by new “revolutionary” treatments. however, at present exorbitant prices, eastern european countries cannot afford the new treatments, while in western rich and developed countries (e.g. germany and france) they are already available. concerted efforts of governments, public health officials, and the community at large, are needed to negotiate agreem...

There seems to be almost decade long consensus on what are the key problems in innovations systems in Eastern European (EE) countries. The consensus runs through social scientists inand outside Eastern Europe to official statements of the European Commission. Briefly, there are two key challenges in the innovation systems in Eastern European countries: first, mismatch between R&D and education ...

This paper compares the institutions and goals of the USSR, the EU, and the CIS to understand the differing origins and competing tendencies of these alternative models of transnational governance. It then projects those models through history to examine the current relationships of the former Soviet Republics to the EU and the United States. Understanding the historical sources and development...

Moscow’s hegemonic stance on the post-Soviet space and its provocations in Ukraine force the European Union to find strategic clarity in its eastern neighbourhood. Often in the midst of discontinuous internal reform processes, the countries to the Union’s east find themselves hanging between a vague “wider Europe” proposal from Brussels and Moscow’s increasingly forceful idea of a “wider Russia...

BACKGROUND Health inequalities have widened within and between many European countries over recent decades, but Europe-wide sub-national trends have been largely overlooked. For regions across the European Union (EU), we assess how geographical inequalities (i.e., between regions) and sociospatial inequalities (i.e., between regions grouped by an area-level measure of average household income) ...