Monetary efficacy in the community level

Hypothesis of the paper is that the monetary room for manoeuvre in the European Community is determined by the institutional and strategic characteristics of the ECB, moreover the financial market environment composed by multi-state community. The methodology of the paper is built on the evaluation of the decision making and strategy of ECB as institutional aspect, and the monetary transmission in national financial markets. In policy evaluation, the monetary targeting is surveyed through HICP, monetary base, central bank rates, exchange rates and treatment of price impacts. The transmission is examined through analysis of structure of the member state’s financial markets.

Systemic country differences in the European innovation performance - Does institutional context matter?

The so-called "High Performance Working System" (HPWS) and the lean production are representing the theoretical and methodological foundations of this paper. In this relation it is worth making distinction between various theoretical streams of the HPWS. The first theoretical stream in the literature is focusing on the diffusion of the Japanese-style management and organizational practices both in the US and in the Europe. The second theoretical strand comprises the approach of sociology of work and dealing with the learning/innovation capabilities of the new forms of work organization. Finally, the third theoretical approach is addressing on the types of knowledge and learning process and their relations with the innovation capabilities of the firm. The authors’ analysis is based on the international comparison, both in regional and in cross country comparison. For regional comparison the share of ICT clusters in Europe, USA and the rest of the world was assessed. For the purpose of the cross-country comparison in the EU, the innovation performance measured by the index Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) was used in both the before and after the financial crisis.