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The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the nature of undeclared work in South East Europe and the rest of the European Union and in doing so, to evaluate critically the validity of depicting the character of undeclared work as being the same everywhere.

A 2007 survey of undeclared work is reported, conducted in 27 European Union (EU) member states involving 26,659 face‐to‐face interviews. This paper focuses on the results of the 2,432 interviews conducted in five South East European countries, namely Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Romania and Slovenia.

In South Eastern Europe, more undeclared work is found to be waged employment and conducted by marginalised population groups out of necessity compared with other EU regions. Nevertheless, and similar to other EU regions, most undeclared work is conducted on an own‐account basis, rather than as waged employment, for close social relations, rather than anonymous employers, and out of choice rather than necessity, although different mixtures prevail in different places and populations both within South Eastern Europe and across the EU as a whole.

This recognition of the multifarious work relations and motives involved in undeclared work, and different mixtures in varying populations, displays the need to move beyond treating undeclared work as everywhere the same and towards nuanced spatially sensitive representations.

Given the proportion of undeclared work conducted on an own‐account basis and for closer social relations, this paper reveals that if South East European governments continue to seek its eradication, they will deter with one hand precisely the entrepreneurship and mutual aid that with another they are seeking to nurture.

This is the first evaluation of undeclared work in South East Europe and the EU.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the banking systems in Western, and Central and Southeastern Europe, focusing on the interactive factors of anti‐money laundering, transitional economies and the underground illicit economy.

Provides a comparative analysis of the banking systems in Western, and Central and Southeastern Europe.

The transition economies of central and Southeastern Europe face, and have been confronted for over a generation by, the interlinked problems of the transition stage post‐1989, the alternative or illegal economy, and the vulnerability of banking systems to money laundering. In contrast, by the 1990s, Western European central banks have become established as an essential government organ in macro‐economic policies.

Suggests an interesting lesson that might be gained from the experiences of central and Southeastern Europe and anti‐money laundering since the late‐1990s, where a national bank or central bank has not been essential, indeed has been comparatively unimportant, compared to the developed banking system led by the individual banks.

Amid the expanding demand on the autism service delivery system, little knowledge is accumulated regarding access and availability of support and services in the region of Southern and South-Eastern Europe – critical for improvement of individual outcomes, as well as family quality of life. The purpose of this paper is to explore how service delivery systems are responding to the specific needs of autistic individuals with autism, as perceived by parents.

A qualitative exploratory descriptive method was used. Thematic analysis was used as a pragmatic method to report on the experiences of parents (92% mothers, n = 55) of children, youth and young autistic adults (76% male) across six South and South-Eastern European counties that participated in a survey involving a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection.

Thematic analysis revealed three broad themes: challenging pathways to service utilization, insufficient service options and providers’ competences and lack of continuous and meaningful support across life span.

The findings from this study add to the small body of literature specific to South and South-Eastern Europe, by exposing problems related to meeting the needs of autistic children and youth and potential ways to strengthen services, as perceived by parents. The findings have potential policy ramifications for the region in which the research was conducted.

The focus of this paper is on developing an understanding, and benchmarking, human resource management (HRM) issues in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in South‐Eastern Europe. The importance of SME's in helping transition‐based economies develop is critical, but at the same time the research indicates that the movement toward westernized business systems has a dramatic impact on the human resources within such businesses. Toward addressing this linkage, critical HRM issues related to work outcomes, measures of satisfaction, and managerial support were studied with a sample of nearly 300 employees from 21 SMEs in a country in South‐Eastern Europe (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). The data suggest that SMEs are not currently giving their employees what they want from their job (e.g. career development, participation in decision making) and that women are treated differently than men creating an imbalance within the workforce. From these data recommendations are drawn for SMEs on how to move forward as transition unfolds.

Focusing on an international trainee- and internship programme, this paper aims to propose a new framework that links organisational strategies regarding ethnic diversity with career competencies of the programme participants.

The paper adopts a case study design. It examines the interplay of the perspectives of the organisation, which is an Austrian bank, and of the programme participants, who are university graduates from South-Eastern Europe. It draws on the typology of diversity strategies by Ortlieb and Sieben (2013) and the categorisation of individual career competencies by DeFillippi and Arthur (1994).

The bank benefits from the programme participants’ competencies with regard to South-Eastern Europe and increased legitimacy gained from the public. Programme participants acquire many knowing-how, knowing-why and knowing-whom competencies, especially if the bank pursues a so-called learning strategy towards ethnic diversity. On the other hand, individual knowing-how competency supports an organisation’s antidiscrimination strategy, whereas knowing-why and knowing-whom competencies benefit the organisational learning strategy.

Although the paper builds on a single case study and the ability to generalise is limited, the findings imply that future human resource development concepts should jointly consider the perspectives of both organisations and individuals.

Owing to their high strategic relevance, organisations should look into the competencies of skilled migrants and evaluate the critical resources they offer. Both organisational learning and an organisation’s strategic development are key concerns. The proposed framework helps to effectively design trainee- and internship programmes and simultaneously anticipate organisational and individual consequences thereof at an early stage.

The proposed framework concerning the interplay between organisational and individual perspectives as well as the regional focus on South-Eastern Europe present novelties.

In the present paper we assess the impact of the Eurozone’s economic policies on specific South-Eastern European countries, namely Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovenia, and Turkey.

Since the countries under investigation are connected to the European Union (EU) or the Eurozone and the economic interdependence among them is evolving, we carried out our analysis using the VECMX* framework.

Our results indicate that the transition economies in our sample react in a similar manner to changes in international macroeconomic policies. Cyprus and Greece react also in a similar way, but these responses are very small in magnitude. Finally, Turkey behaves in a different way, probably due to the inflationary pressures in its economy. In general, there is evidence of linkages and interdependence among the EU or Eurozone members of the region.

We did not construct a full structural model proposed by economic theory, but instead we estimated a reduced-form model. Data limitation is one reason. The other reason is that our sample countries are extremely heterogeneous. Also, for most of the sample countries there is an acute problem of structural uncertainty of their economies yet.

The way that the economies under investigation react to changes in international macroeconomic policies, may influence the Eurozone policy makers regarding the implemented monetary policy.

To our knowledge, the above methodology is implemented for the first time in the sample countries and provides a detailed investigation regarding their economic policies and the effects of the Eurozone policies.

We analyze the determinants of the cyclical position in some Baltics and South-Eastern European countries as well as peripheral European countries over the period 2000–2013. Specifically, we consider a sample of eight economies: Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania for the sub-sample of Baltics and South-Eastern European economies; and Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain for the sub-sample covering EMU peripheral countries. To this end, we proceed in two steps. In the first, we simulate Taylor rules for each studied countries in order to see to what extent the effective monetary policy has suffered from an expansionary bias. Such analysis is conducted for both peripheral and Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe (CESE) countries. In a second step, we compare the simulated Taylor rules for our selected CESE countries with the Eurozone Taylor rule. Our contribution is threefold. First we show that the ineffectiveness of monetary policy to face imbalances – and especially financial imbalances – suggest that the EU should adopt macroprudential measures. Second, the experience of CESE and Peripheral countries suggests that fiscal policy has tended to be pro-cyclical or at least neutral. Third, we underline the importance of using the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure as a tool to implement automatic adjustment mechanisms.