State of the art report

Empirical comparative research on economic and social phenomena at the European level is one of the most urgent needs for understanding different national economies and societies and for their integration into a common Europe. The first prerequisite for high-quality crossnational research is the existence and availability of high-quality micro-databases offering comparable data for the countries under study. The bottleneck for micro-analytic research on European topics and issues is the non-existence and/or non-accessibility of sufficient microdata that are comparable, and also longitudinal if the purpose of the research is to deal properly with dynamics. In addition, no user-friendly links exist from macro-economic/social information and institutional data to micro datasets.