Still a distinctive southern European employment model?

Current similarities among the four southern European EU Member States—Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain—with respect not only to labour market characteristics but also to the institutional arrangements that influence labour supply, utilisation and demand corroborate the concept of a distinctive southern European employment model. Its origins go back to common features in the pattern of socio‐economic development and the political history of these countries. In the past 20 years or so, national differences in the pace and content of institutional change have increased diversity within the model and eroded some of its components. They have not, however, destroyed its unity and distinctiveness.     

Greece in the European Union: policy lessons from two decades of membership

This paper examines the first two decades of Greece’s experience as a member of the European Union (EU). In evaluating the Greek experience within the EU, we derive three fundamental policy lessons that apply both to similar small peripheral countries now entering the EU and to the EU itself in terms of facilitating their integration in a large economic area. First, small peripheral countries that enter the EU must address the structural deficiencies of their economies before entry in order to minimize the impact of increased competition after the removal of trade protection, and follow domestic policies that maintain and promote their comparative advantage within the EU. Second, the Convergence Criteria have proven to be a successful mechanism for countries with a poor historical policy record to achieve macroeconomic stability, as shown by the case of Greece. Third, common EU policies can be very helpful in facilitating structural reforms in small peripheral economies. However, these policies must be continuously evaluated and improved so that their effectiveness is maximized.     

Re‐Thinking Territorial Cohesion in the European Planning Context

The socio‐economic dimensions of cohesion have long been considered an integral part of Europeanization. However, recently a third dimension has been added to the Europe 2020 cohesion policy debate: territorial cohesion. Consequently this term is as yet undeveloped, resulting in a lack of consensus on how to define and interpret it. Such ambiguity represents a theoretical and empirical challenge to regional actors needing to respond to European Union (EU) directives while operationalizing the concept within their national and/or regional agendas. This article uses Portugal as a case study to examine how the concept of territorial cohesion is being interpreted and transposed from EU‐based to territorial‐based instruments and policy documents. First, we conducted a qualitative content analysis (QCA) of a selection of European and regional publications to compare their intrinsic discourses. This was followed by around 60 structured qualitative interviews, conducted with leading actors who had been instrumental in writing or implementing regional policy documents. On the basis of this dual analysis we conclude that, as a whole, the writers of the Portuguese strategic documents successfully transposed this concept, although perceptible differences exist between regions, as local actors have selectively redefined it to better suit their strategic priorities. These differences are debated with the aim of contributing to the design of effective public policies that facilitate inclusion, cohesion and Europeanization.     

Too big to fail? The dynamics of EU influence and fiscal consolidation in Italy and Spain (2008–2016)

ABSTRACT

The article studies the dynamics of fiscal consolidation and public sector reforms in Italy and Spain under the EU governance that took shape as a reaction to the Eurozone crisis. We show how three types of EU pressure – fiscal and economic coordination rules, conditionality, and back-room diplomacy have operated in conjunction. We also show that Italy was more willing than Spain to resist EU pressure. Based on a Two-Level Game framework, we argue that this can be explained by the greater opposition to European integration that has developed in Italy compared to Spain.     

Defining and measuring the development of a country over time: a proposal of a new index

This paper introduces the concept of harmonic growth as an extended acceptation of the notion of development, and discusses its measurement via the Harmonic Growth Index (HGI). The growth is seen as harmonic when the behaviour of a benchmark time series, which here is a measure of wealth, such as per capita GDP, is followed by a similar pattern in socio-economic series. Unlike most widely used indicators in the literature, which take into account the measurement of development over a single time, HGI measures the degree to which a social indicator’s time series pattern matches with the GDP’s. The index is a function, ranging in [0, 1], of the coefficients of the uniform B-splines fitted to each time series, according to the functional data framework. A case study on Mediterranean welfare countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain), in the period 1996–2007, shows critical differences in the selected indicators which can be ascribed to their dissimilar specific development models. HGI can be also considered as a general index to measure the similarity between time patterns, or as an alternative to correlation for (non-necessarily linear) time series.     

Social sustainability of regional transportation: An assessment framework with application to EU road transport

The assessment of transportation social sustainability appeals to many scholars as an essential issue but imposes a risk of selecting inadequate factors and methods to measure social phenomena. In this study, based on an extensive review, we identify the measurable key social indicators (instead of the economic or environmental factors commonly used) and propose a comprehensive evaluation framework for relative performance analysis of social sustainability in the regional context. This work is the first attempt to assess regional social sustainability of transport explicitly utilizing a multi-output performance measure. We use Shannon entropy to combine the results of selected data envelopment analysis (DEA) models into a unified social sustainability performance score. The method is applied to regional road transport in the European Union (EU) member states for the period 2004–2017. The empirical section explores individual profiles of EU countries, compares the states grouped into two clusters of old (EU-15) and new (EU-13) EU members, and examines their social sustainability performance over time. The analysis suggests that considering only social factors in the measurement eliminates the bias resulting from the inclusion of economic factors. As a result, our method prevents inaccurate inflation of the scores of more economically advanced countries. The findings also draw attention to the car dependence problem associated with high motorization rates in affluent EU-15 states. The study confirms the capacity of the proposed DEA-based framework to serve as an adequate tool for measuring the social sustainability of transport, which can support policymakers by providing useful benchmarks employing social factors.     

From sending to host societies: immigration in Greece,Ireland and Spain in the 21st century

In a relatively short period of time, new immigration patterns have changed the geography of immigration of the EU15, bringing three old emigration countries, Ireland, Spain and Greece, to the forefront of the new immigration wave. This article studies the analogies and differences of the recent immigration experience of this group of countries, focusing on the demographic characteristics of the immigrants (origin, sex, gender and education), labour market insertion (wages, labour market segregation and quality of matching) and overall economic performance in terms of poverty rates.     

The debt crisis in Ireland

This paper takes a multidisciplinary approach to analyze the current debt crisis in Ireland. It briefly reviews Irish economic performance from 1980 to 2008 and in particular the Celtic Tiger years. The paper looks at changes in the Irish money supply and its contribution to the Irish housing bubble and the subsequent economic problems facing Ireland. An estimate of the negative wealth effect in Ireland since 2007 is made. Given that Ireland is a small open economy, a number of other factors which are both domestic and international are considered in an attempt to explain what has happened in Ireland, where might Ireland go from here and what lessons can be learnt. These factors include: the theory of political economics, the principal-agent problem, the theory of optimal currency areas, the Balassa Samuelson effect, the dynamics of a capitalist economy, neo-liberalism, European monetary integration, international bond markets and ‘insurance’ that was sold to cover a Eurozone breakup. The Irish culture is considered to differentiate Ireland from other EU countries, in particular, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain.     

Influence of the EU (and the IMF) on domestic cutback management: a nine-country comparative analysis

ABSTRACT

The influence of the EU (and the IMF) on domestic cutback management were studied in nine European countries. In this concluding article, a cross-country comparative analysis is presented. The influence of the EU and the IMF being most evident in bailed-out countries, we first take a closer look at the loan programmes in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, plus the hardly-known earlier bailouts in Hungary and Latvia. We then turn to two factors that influence cutbacks and reforms: economics and politics. Finally, the concept of the influence of the EU (and the IMF) is differentiated into degrees and types of influence.     

Causality-in-variance and causality-in-mean between the Greek sovereign bond yields and Southern European banking sector equity returns

This paper adopts the robust cross-correlation function methodology developed by Hong (J Econom 103:183–224, 2001) in order to test for volatility and mean spillovers between Greek long-term government bond yields and the banking sector stock returns of four Southern European countries, namely Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Spain. Its primary focus is on investigating the potential impacts of the recent European sovereign debt crisis. While most previous studies have focused on within-country causalities, we rather assess cross-country transmission effects. The presented results provide evidence of bidirectional volatility spillovers between Greek long-term interest rates and the banking sector equities of Portugal, Italy, and Spain that emerged during the European sovereign debt crisis. We also find significant unidirectional causality-in-mean from bank stock returns in Greece to Greek long-term bond yields during the crisis period as well as significant causality at the mean level from the bank equity returns in Portugal, Italy, and Spain to Greek bond yields.     

Economic Integration and Regional Business Cycles: Evidence from the Iberian Regions*

This paper provides evidence of the positive impact of economic integration on EU regions’ business cycles convergence by focusing on two neighbouring countries: Spain and Portugal. We show that while a rise in cross‐country business cycle correlation has also been experienced by other European countries, it has been relatively more pronounced for Iberian regions. Econometric evidence suggests that the existence of an administrative border, the economic size of regions and their industrial structures can explain a substantial proportion of regional cycles.     

Incorporating sustainability indicators into a computable general equilibrium model of the scottish economy

In recent years, the notion of sustainable development has begun to figure prominently in the regional, as well as the national, policy concerns of many industrialized countries. Indicators have typically been used to monitor changes in economic, environmental and social variables to show whether economic development is on a sustainable path. In this paper we endogenize individual and composite environmental indicators within an appropriately specified computable general equilibrium modelling framework for Scotland. In principle, at least, this represents a very powerful modelling tool that can inform the policy making process by identifying the impact of any exogenous policy change on the key endogenous environmental and economic indicators. It can also identify the effects of any binding environmental targets on economic activity.     

Dynamics of group grievances from a global cohesion perspective

Grievances are vulnerable to state development and harmony; however, some factors provoke the masses and groups to vulnerability and state fragility (SF) by disturbing social cohesion. Under the grievance assumptions on the political process, this study has been designed to gauge the nexus of group grievances (GG), an essential parameter of social cohesion, institutional governance (IG), government legitimacy (GL), economic growth (EcG), and population growth (POPG) from the global perspective from 2008 to 2022 in a global panel of 158 countries considering the critical aspect of SF. The statistics reveal that PS is essential in controlling and managing the GG in the state. PS is the most significant factor in harmonizing the state's ethnic minorities, focus, and religious groups with stable policies and their grievances issues. It also states that apart from PS, another aspect of IG, Control of Corruption (CoC), helps mitigate malpractices and provides a transparent environment supporting grievances. It further demonstrates that EcG provokes grievances instead of lessening them among the key groups in the state, especially in the processing of industrialization. Because of the government's partiality to provide benefits to specific groups or sectors, that partiality and injustice hype the grievances among the public. Moreover, POPG is also a significant factor in increasing GG, along with government illegitimacy and untrust. The study concludes that to make the country agile and prosperous, the government should balance developing industrialization without compromising agricultural and domestic industries. It helps states gain public trust in the IG framework and GL. The government should harmonize its policies by tackling all minorities, ethnic, and religious groups coherently to maintain social cohesion in the country. Finally, One of the significant factors in natural resources and the scarcity of global resources is population. It stated that prudent population control measures better assist in resource scarcity and conflict management, such as in EU countries compared to Asia and Africa. Recent grievance movements in Brazil, China, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the US, are the practical application of this study because these countries fall in the list of the top 10 most populous countries. So, population control policies should be effectively implemented to support economic and social parity and mitigate GG.     

Trade,competitiveness and investment: an empirical assessment

ABSTRACT

The Eurozone crisis has exposed several weaknesses of the European Monetary Union economies. This paper aims to assess the impact on external competitiveness of an expansionary capital stock policy that could contribute to reduce the trade balance asymmetries within the EU and help European exporters to recover their competitive role in international markets. A policy action to increase capital stock accumulation through investment in selected European countries could generate a double dividend: increasing both price and nonprice competitiveness, so stimulating their competitive position as exporters, and consolidating the growth path of EU economy. The analysis employs a bilateral trade model built at INFORUM with several distinguishing characteristics: a comprehensive bilateral data set, econometric estimation of key parameters, and emphasis on sectoral details. Our findings show that a capital stock increase is effective in narrowing trade imbalances within EU. Heterogeneous effects are estimated for commodities in China and the US.     

The UK and EMU: Lessons from Europe

Her Majesty's Treasury is due to report in June 2003 on the economic case for the UK adopting the Euro. One criterion concerns the extent of economic convergence between the UK and the European Union countries. Differences in financial, credit and housing institutions between countries present one important subset of constraints to sustained convergence (Maclennan et al, 1998) - largely neglected in the economic literature on common currency areas. These types of differences create tension within the Eurozone. Empirical evidence supporting these concerns has emerged in signs of overheating in the Netherlands, UK and some of the fringe economies, and in the relative stagnation of Germany and Italy. The UK's buoyancy, however, is accompanied by serious economic imbalances, with consequent risks of instability. These would be exacerbated should the UK be prematurely locked into an exchange rate and interest rate regime unresponsive to domestic conditions. There is much to learn from European experience: from Germany and Italy, on the consequences of illiberal economic structures; from The Netherlands, on some of the risks of liberal credit markets; and from Denmark, with a liberal credit market but rational property taxation. In this paper, John Muellbauer argues that convergence does not have to be fully achieved, if there is a counterbalancing policy instrument to mitigate some of the effects of these slow-to-dissipate differences. Specifically in the UK, a reformed system of property taxation would contribute greatly to long-term stability and the preservation of economic balance.     

Demand for money in the Euro area

We analyzed the stability of the money demand function using panel data from January 1999 through March 2006, covering the 11 EU countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain). First, we found that the money demand function was stable with respect to M3. This arguably supports the suitability of the ECB's focus on M3 money supply in its monetary policy. Second, the stability of the money demand function was recognized with respect not only to M3, but also to M1 and M2. Accordingly, the ECB's adoption of M1 or M2 growth as a reference value should probably be considered depending on how conditions change going forward.     

发展中的欧盟高等教育国际化

伴随着欧洲经济一体化的不断深入,日益激烈的国际教育市场的驱使以及信息技术和互联网学习的发展,高等教育国际化越来越成为欧盟继经济联盟和统一货币之后的另一重要行动。欧盟的高等教育国际化进程从欧共体产生之日就开始了其进程,直至今日依然在发展。本文探求了从经济和文化因素分析欧盟国家高等教育的动因,接着从欧盟教育的一体化及其国际发展两个方面讲述了欧盟高等教育国际化的主要举措,企盼为我国高等教育国际化提供启示及借鉴。     

A model for predicting determinants factors for NEETs rates: Support for the decision-makers

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the determining factors of the high levels of NEETs both in EU member states and in partner countries, to support policy steering and increase socio-economic cohesion. The use of longitudinal data (2005–2020) from Eurostat and World Bank databases and selected and the testing of a number of 19 factors likely to influence the rate of NEETs show us that the effectiveness of public policy solutions focused on this category of population increases when complex factors and not singular elements are targeted. From a methodological point of view, we will use MARS models and fixed effects panel models. To account for countries’ heterogeneity, these models are applied to homogeneous groups of countries, identified through cluster analysis. Social cohesion and sustainability measures for policy steering have higher chances if the action of the responsible institutions targets both meso and macro levels, if it acts not only on a factor but also on the causes that favor its manifestation. Our analysis demonstrated that the measures aimed at increasing the chances of NEETs in order to facilitate their access to education, the labor market, and social inclusion must be coordinated with those of support for combating poverty and any type of exclusion, the support given to employers (subsidizing jobs, for example), the family and the community to which the young person belongs or local authorities. Also, the research results show us that there are more common elements between countries when we analyze the factors likely to increase the rate of NEETs than when we focus on their analysis by geographical criteria, based on EU membership status or EU partner status, etc.     

Prospects for an ordoliberal reform of the European Union

This article discusses the prospects for an ordoliberal reform of the European Union in order to tackle its multiple crises. It shows what an ordoliberal European Union would have to look like and examines the constraints its implementation faces. Three reasons are identified that make an ordoliberal reform of the EU at present unlikely. First, in the EU's most powerful member state, Germany, where ordoliberalism has its origins, economic policy adheres increasingly less to this strain of economic thinking. Second, given the primacy of European integration in domestic politics, Germany values European unity higher than economic principles. Third, once Brexit is complete Germany will lack influential allies for an ordoliberal reshaping of the EU.     

Does sport affect the competitiveness of European Union countries? An analysis of the degree of innovation and GDP per capita using linear and QCA models

The sport industry has experienced great growth in recent years worldwide, and especially in the European Union (EU) countries. However, despite the role that this industry can play in improving the competitiveness of these countries (Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and innovation performance), no studies have been found that analyse its influence. So, the main aim of this study is, firstly, to analyse the relationship between the innovation performance and the GDP per capita of EU countries, and, secondly, to find out how sport-related indicators and different innovation-related indicators influence the innovation performance and GDP per capita of the EU countries. To this end, two different methodologies have been used: hierarchical regression models and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). A total sample of 23 EU countries have been analysed. The results show that GDP per capita and innovation performance are highly correlated in a positive and significant way (0.76; p?<?.0001), and that the variables related to sport help explain the variance of these two variables, highlighting as necessary variable in both cases the growth in the sports sector (consistency >0.90). Finally, a number of practical implications are presented that can help policy makers to improve the competitiveness of EU countries.