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This paper represents a first approach to the acoustical regulations in some European Union countries. It is only considered the case of dwellings in Residential Buildings.The analysis is limited to the comparison of the different indexes used in the several countries. Some examples illustrate the enormous differences in philosophy and requirements of the different Regulations that were analysed.The conclusions emphasize the need to begin the preparation of a common code that could be used as a European Union Regulation in the field of Building Acoustics.

In the 1970s Islamic financial system based on religious belief emerged in some of Muslim countries. The purpose of the Islamic financial system is just like in the case of the conventional one, to facilitate the smooth flow of funds between savers and investors. However, what is distinguishable about the Islamic financial system is that it is based on principles of sharia, which is a religious law of Muslims. With the share of around 80% in total assets of Islamic financial institutions, Islamic banks play a dominant role in the Islamic financial industry. They operate in over 75 countries, not only Muslim ones, but also those, where Muslim minority live. The aim of the paper is to analyse the opportunities and challenges for development of Islamic banking in the European Union countries. The analysis should give an answer to the question whether Islamic banks can have more significant presence in the European financial market in the future, than they have today. The article consists of four parts, not counting introduction and concluding remarks. The first part of the paper is a descriptive analysis of the main principles of sharia, which have impact on operations of Islamic banks. They include: prohibition of interest (riba), avoidance of uncertainty (gharar) and prohibition of trading in illegal (haram) products. Because of the necessity to comply with those principles, the instruments offered by Islamic banks must be constructed differently than conventional ones. Islamic financial instruments are briefly described in the second part of the paper. In the third section of the article the evolution and the current state of Islamic banking in the EU countries is presented. The main focus is put on the United Kingdom, since in this country Islamic banking sector is the most developed. In the fourth part prospects for development of Islamic banking in the EU are discussed. First the factors that should contribute to the development are presented. Then challenges faced by Islamic banking industry in the EU are ...

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to examine Okun's Law in European countries by distinguishing between the transitory and the permanent effects of output changes upon unemployment and by examining the effect of labor market protection policies upon Okun's coefficients.


Design/methodology/approach
– Quarterly data for 13 European Union countries, from the second quarter of 1993 until the first quarter of 2014, are used. Panel data techniques and Mundlak decomposition models are estimated.


Findings
– Okun's Law is robust to alternative specifications. The effect of output changes to unemployment rates is weaker for countries with increased labor market protection expenditures and it is more persistent for countries with low labor market protection.


Originality/value
– The paper provides evidence that the permanent effect of output changes upon unemployment rates is quantitatively larger than the transitory impact. In addition, it provides evidence that increased labor market protection mitigates the adverse effects of a decrease in output growth rate upon unemployment.

In the 1980s and, in particular, in the 1990s the countries of the European Union experienced divergent developments of gross fixed capital formation. Estimating an investment function for a panel of ten countries and analyzing the paths of the determinants of investment in the countries under consideration reveals that the different development of final demand is the main factor responsible for the divergences in investment. Other factors are disparities in the decline of real interest rates and of relative prices for capital goods.

Capítulos en libros ; -- ; Public finance has been a matter of constant concern for the EU since its inception. Although this concern is not exclusive to the EU, successive enlargements and Community projects have led to regard public finance as one of the core elements of the economic policy in Europe. The main purpose of this chapter is, therefore, to shed some light on the situation of public finance in the EU Member States and its recent development. Moreover, all through the chapter, the relation between public finance and the economic reality in the EU is analyzed through variables such as development, growth and unemployment. Lastly, taxes distribution in European countries will enable to gain a better understanding of both the relative importance of the public sector in terms of revenues, and those economic concepts on which taxes are levied to a greater or lesser extent ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

The European Union (EU) is a political and economic union of democratic European countries. One of his goals was and is to equalize living conditions in all countries. Unfortunately, it is not. Today, still, there are clear disparities both economic and social. It is worth a closer look, how does the situation in the UE at the national level. The aim of this study is to analyze the most current size selected macroeconomic and social at the EU member states to show that, despite the common policy of these countries are different.

This article investigates the competitiveness of agri-food exports of the European Union (EU-27) countries on global markets, using the revealed comparative advantage (B) index over the years 2000-11. Panel unit root tests, mobility index and the Kaplan-Meier survival rates of the B index are used. The majority of agri-food products in the EU-27 countries show a comparative disadvantage on global markets. The B indices of the EU-27 countries tend to convergence. Most of the old EU-15 Member States experienced a greater number of agri-food products having a longer duration of revealed comparative advantages than have most of the new EU-12 Member States. Among the most successful Member States in agri-food export competitiveness on global markets are the Netherlands, France and Spain. Adapted from the source document.

The paper proposes an assessment of citizenship rules in European Union countries. First, it designs an analytical framework in order to evaluate the rules of political membership from a liberal-democratic perspective. Second, it develops a systematic comparative study of the citizenship rules of the 27 member states of the EU. I argue that a liberal-democratic conception of membership requires certain degrees of inclusiveness as well as exclusiveness. Moreover, liberal-democratic membership can be compatible with both major ideological views on membership –ethno-cultural and civic-territorial. It is not the ethnic or civic ideological conception of the polity that renders the rules of membership illiberal, but their unjustified scope.

Islamic banking is a relative young industry, with a high rate of growth, which in the last years became a highly discussed subject, due to the challenges and opportunities that it brings. Due to the fact, that in the last decade, the Islamic banking made its presence in the European Union market, too, in this paper we try to describe the main features of the Islamic banking transactions and to identify the challenges and opportunities that its brings.

Terrorism is widely regarded as a public bad vis-à-vis security - a public good - affecting the subjective well-being of citizens. As studies have shown, citizens' risk-perceptions and risk-assessment are affected by large scale terrorist acts. Reported evidence shows that individuals are often willing to trade-off civil liberties for enhanced security particularly as a post-terrorist attack reaction as well as adopting more conservative views. Within this strand of the literature, this paper examines whether terrorism and in particular mass-casualty terrorist attacks affect citizens' political selfplacement on the left-right scale of the political spectrum. To this effect the Eurobarometer Surveys for twelve European Union countries are utilised and Ordered Probit models are employed for the period 1985-2010 with over 230 thousand observations used in the estimations. On balance, the findings reported herein seem to be pointing to a shift in respondents' self-positioning towards the right of the political spectrum.