THE POLITICS AND COMPLEXITY OF TRADE UNION RESPONSES TO NEW MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

Miguel Martinez Lucio and Syd Weston, who are Lecturers in Human Resource Management at the Cardiff Business School, emphasise that, in seeking to understand trade union responses to HRM and new management practices, it is important to take into account their traditions and internal decision-making processes as well as external influences. They suggest, in particular, that it is possible to identify three main ‘clusters’ of opinion which have emerged in recent years and which go to make up the complex position of the TUC. They go on to argue that, as unions learn more about HRM and new management practices, they will tend to exert a more significant influence on the form and implementation of such initiatives.     

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.     

Political determinants of fiscal transparency: a panel data empirical investigation

The investigation of the determinants of fiscal transparency has been mostly performed on cross-sectional data, and it has produced mixed results. This paper improves the existing literature by performing a static and dynamic panel analysis of the effect of a set of political variables on the level of fiscal transparency in 36 democratic countries. By using a recent measure of fiscal transparency based on IMF Governance Finance Statistics and available from 2003 to 2013, we find strong links between political environments and the dynamics of fiscal disclosure. Our results show that government control over the legislature exerts some negative effect on fiscal transparency, while the effect of government ideology is shown to be at least fragile. Furthermore we find that legislature fragmentation exerts a negative effect on fiscal transparency, which suggests that competition within the parliaments does not increase fiscal transparency, but instead it induces governments to react by reducing accessibility to information.     

Do universities knowledge spillovers impact on new firm’s growth? Empirical evidence from UK

The paper explores the effect of scientific institutions on firm’s growth, coupling regional science and entrepreneurship approaches. We focus on the role of universities, largely considered in the literature as the main source of knowledge spillovers. To this purpose, we centre our attention on UK public companies on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), a market dedicated to young and growing companies in both science and non-science based industries. In the paper we investigate the growth determinants of 231 listed firms which have gone public during the period going from 1995 to 2006. To our purposes, in the empirical analysis we use the Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effects model. The results supports the hypothesis that, controlling for firm’s idiosyncratic factors and external forces, both universities knowledge input and output are important determinants of the growth of entrepreneurial firms listed on the AIM.

Making networks and (re)making trade union bureaucracy: a European‐wide case study of trade union engagement with the Internet and networking

The Internet increasingly forms part of formal trade union responses to changing economic and political challenges but in quite complex ways, due to the manner in which different constituents harness and mediate its development. The paper shows how networking is the object of competing meanings and interventions, and the subject of a range of issues in terms of organisational hierarchies, competing communities of practice and competing understandings and traditions of the Internet itself.     

Exchange controls, international capital flows and saving-investment correlations in the UK: An empirical investigation

Exchange Controls, International Capital Flows and Saving-Investment Correlations in the UK: An Empirical Investigation. - This paper reexamines the Feldstein-Horioka approach to measure the degree of international capital mobility, focusing on the difference between the short-run and the long-run saving-investment correlation coefficient. The authors also investigate the effectiveness of the abolition of exchange control which, in October 1979, ended a long period of restrictions on capital flows between the UK and the international economy. Their results suggest that the short-run saving-investment correlation is significantly higher than the long-run one. Unlike most of the relevant literature, the empirical evidence suggests that the UK is financially highly integrated with the world economy after 1979.     

Industrial and knowledge relocation strategies under the challenges of globalization and digitalization: the move of small and medium enterprises among territorial systems

Owing to globalization and digitalization, small and medium firms adopt relocation strategies to transfer their activities (and implicitly also knowledge) among territorial systems, inducing transformations into both source and destination areas. Cognitive proximity and knowledge creation/transfer play a crucial role, especially critical when concerning tacit knowledge, which can be transferred only by moving people. In each industrial cluster or industrial district it is possible to identify a kernel of critical activities, which requests complex competencies and has high added value, and a kernel of tacit knowledge, which is based on repeated face-to-face interactions. The former resists globalization and the latter prevents digitalization, which impacts heavily on territorial systems lacking trust, cooperative attitude, and other socio-cognitive factors. Relocation strategies are divided into selective and replicative alternatives, depending on the ability to preserve large kernels. When replicative strategies are followed by many firms, the socio-cognitive integrity and the economic competitiveness of the territorial system are severely damaged. Thus, in order to prevent the ruinous consequences of massive replicative relocation, local and regional governments should steer territorial systems towards selective relocation strategies supporting innovation and improving human capital, paying attention and developing socio-cognitive factors too. In the final part of the paper, case studies of industrial and knowledge relocation at intra-European level are discussed, and a general model is proposed.     

The evolution of mobile communications in Europe: The transition from the second to the third generation

This paper analyses the evolution of the mobile communications industry in the European Union. The research focuses its interest on the different roles played by the regulator in Europe and in other regions of the world (mainly the US). The diffusion of GSM was extraordinarily fast in Europe, mainly due to the adoption of a unified standard from inception. This rapid diffusion has resulted in an important competitive advantage for European operators. Interestingly, while the regulator acted similarly in the case of UMTS, the development of the latter has faced many problems and, presently, its diffusion is still low (about 5% in the EU). The paper also offers basic information on market structure that may be useful for extracting some preliminary conclusions about the degree of rivalry within the industry and the differences that can be observed between European countries.