“The beautiful thing about working in an environment where there’s various generations represented is that you get a lot of inspiration from day-to-day conversations.”
“We have hired a lot of young researchers with a lot of new ideas and insights, also in terms of methods and data.”
“The younger people open our eyes to new methods and add data to our website in real time, which enables us to carry out short-term analysis.”
“I try to prepare data from different sources so that it can be easily used for research. The big problem today is that there is a huge amount of data from different sources.”
“Working with observational data is a very rich source of information which we have to exploit to get a better understanding of how humans interact with each other.”
“It’s always tempting to let the data speak and to see what data tells us then. But from the perspective of the good classical research approach, it’s always necessary to start from the question.”
“I would like the institute to continue to participate more in the pan-European discussion on economic policy and to contribute its special focus on the periphery of Europe. Discussions in Brussels often still focus on the old EU15.”
“wiiw is indeed the leading institute in researching, understanding and explaining the EU enlargement.”
“New themes that have historically not been at the focus of the institute become unavoidable and we have to adapt to those. That is the green transition, gender, digitalisation and automation.”
“Health economics is becoming important because the pandemic has shown that health crisis can result in economic crisis.”
“There are questions about how convergence or regional developments can interact in a united Europe. There are so many relevant economic topics where wiiw can help a lot.”
“Fifty years of experience have created an unbelievable treasure to learn from the past and, in these difficult times, to arrive at forecasts that are based on knowledge. For Vienna, this view of Eastern Europe and Southeast Europe continues to be of great importance.”
“We have the largest World Bank office outside the US in Vienna, which is mainly responsible for the Western Balkans. This requires a lot of expertise and input from institutes like wiiw, and we are happy to have it here.”
“Independent institutes like the Vienna Institute can speak truth to power, they can provide important credible messaging to the European Union authorities and the member governments about how EU enlargement affects candidate countries.”
“My vision is that we should conduct opportunity-oriented research on major societal challenges such as climate change and digitalisation, and then identify opportunities to shape economic policy accordingly.”
“I hope the institute will continue to do what it is good at, namely providing in-depth country expertise on the neighbouring Eastern European countries. But I also hope they can build bridges to new topics like the green transition and climate change.”
