We examine the trajectories of the real unit labour costs (RULCs) in a selection of Eurozone economies. Strong asymmetries in the convergence process of the RULCs and its components —real wages, capital intensity, and technology— are uncovered through decomposition and cluster analyses. In the last three decades, the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) succeeded in reducing their RULCs by more than their northern partners. With the exception of Ireland, however, technological progress was weak; it was through capital intensification that periphery economies gained efficiency and competitiveness. Cluster heterogeneity, and lack of robustness in cluster composition, is a reflection of the difficulties in achieving real convergence and, by extension, nominal convergence. We conclude by outlining technology as the key convergence factor, and call for a renewed attention to real convergence indicators to strengthen the process of European integration.
This paper provides an empirical investigation of the wage, price and unemployment dynamics that have taken place in Spain during the last two decades. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the impact of the European economic integration process on Spanish labour market and the convergence to a European level of prosperity. We find some important lessons to be learnt from the Spanish experience that should be relevant for the new member states. Second, before fixing the real exchange rate it seems crucial that it is on its sustainable (competitive) purchasing power parity level. First, high competitiveness in the tradable sector seems crucial for the real and nominal convergence to be successful. The increase in consumption wages and consumer prices as a result of the Balassa-Samuelson effect should not be allowed to exceed the improvement in productivity. Second, before fixing the real exchange rate it seems crucial that it is on its sustainable (competitive) purchasing power parity level. Third, there does not seem to be a short-cut to a European level of standard of living: the path to sustainable prosperity seems to follow the path of productivity improvement. Forth, excessive real wage increases seem to lead to increasing unemployment, slowdown in productivity growth, higher interest rates, and loss of competitiveness. On the other hand, the access to the European market and the possibility of increased export demand is likely to speed up the convergence process as long as competitiveness is not eroded by excess wage increases.
In this paper we analyse income inequality across EU countries. Monitoring the between-country inequality trend at the EU level provides information about income convergence of EU countries with important implications at highly topical issues such as social cohesion and cross-country migration. In addition to the analysis of the between-country inequality, given that monetary and market integration may affect inequality differently across country-groups, we decompose between-country inequality in its two basic components, that is, inequality between-group and within-group of countries. Groups correspond to non-euro zone, core euro-zone and non- core euro-zone countries. This analysis will allow us to investigate how the observed trend in between-country inequality is related to developments in the between or the within-group component. Three conclusions emerge. First, between-country inequality experienced a trend break at the beginning of the 70s, demarcating of declining inequality to a period where inequality shows no decline up to the introduction of the euro, when betweencountry inequality increased and, consequently, income diverged among European countries. Second, the introduction of the euro was coupled with important recompositional effects of between-country inequality in Europe: from 1999 onwards between-group inequality shapes the developments of between-country inequality, thus, that the observed divergence in income from the beginning of the 2000s is explained by the income divergence between core an non-core countries.Third, shocks to between-country inequality tend to be persistent implying that specific policy measures at the EU level need to be implemented to cope with the undesirable effects of rising inequality.
La concepcion, proyecto y ejecucion de grandes obras publicos de edificacion e ingenieria lleva consigo la gestion sistematica de todos los riesgos inherentes a los mismos y para lo que es imprescindible adoptar modelos de gestion, dotar de medios materiales humanos suficientes y capaces y concretar todos los roles y obligaciones a asumir por cada uno de los agentes que finalmente participan en los exitos y/o fracasos que se obtengan. En la presente comunicacion se expone el analisis de riesgo del caso concreto de un nuevo campus universitario de la Universidad de Granada y el modelo de gestion de proyecto y construccion finalmente adoptado.
Palabras clave: direccion integrada; riesgo; grandes proyectos publicos
This article examines whether the energy consumption–GDP relationship is in long-term equilibrium for EU-15 countries. Unlike many previous works, we apply a nonlinear unit root test introduced by Kapetanios et al. (2003a) and extended by Chong et al. (2008) that identifies not only deterministic cointegration, but also the stronger concept of stochastic cointegration. The results yield a clear pattern: Austria, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain must achieve greater emissions reductions between 2009 and 2012 to reach their respective Kyoto targets.