EU accession: Negotiating “environmental dumping”?

“Environmental dumping” is a concern frequently raised in discussions on the potential risks involved in the eastern enlargement of the European Union¹ (EU).² There is a general concern that the Central and Eastern European accession countries may be neither willing nor able to fully apply the EU’s environmental acquis communautaire, the body of Community environmental legislation, once they have joined the EU. As a result, these countries would benefit from a competitive advantage when selling their goods on the Internal Market. This article asks whether, and in which specific cases, such concerns may be justified.     

HRM practices in China-Western joint ventures: MNC standardization versus localization

In recent years, multinational corporations have become increasingly ascendant in the world economy. The HRM strategies that these corporations adopt may blend global integration with local responsiveness. This paper examines the compatibility between MNC standardization and localization of different HRM practices in a sample of Sino-Western joint ventures. The findings indicate that various HRM practices have different responses to MNC standaridization and localization.     

Human resource management and the performance of Western firms in China

The study examines the relationship between human resource management and organizational performance in sixty-two manufacturing Chinese-Western joint ventures and wholly owned subsidiaries located in different parts of the People's Republic of China. A positive relation was found between firm performance and the extent to which firms used a 'high-performance' HRM system as well as the degree to which they engaged in the integration of HRM and firm strategy.     

Building a financial sector in Central and Eastern Europe

The public mission of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is to foster the transition toward an open, market‐oriented financial sector. It combines private‐sector principles in making investments, building institutions, privatizing banks, and raising equity with policy dialogue with all stakeholders, lawmakers, central banks, regulators, shareholders, and clients. Wellstructured creative individual projects, tailor‐made for the specific situation and executed in a pragmatic and successful way, provide a strong demonstration effect to market participants. Today the financial sector in Central and Eastern Europe is sound, competitive, and provides the fuel for sustained economic growth. Challenges remain, however. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

In the eyes of the beholder: the HRM capabilities of the HR function as perceived by managers and professionals

This study investigated factors influencing line managers' and professionals' perceptions of the HRM capabilities of the HR function. Using a sample of 913 managers and professionals in subsidiaries of 11 Nordic multinational corporations, we tested the extent to which features of the unit's HRM system, attitudes of the unit's general manager and characteristics of the HR manager helped explain the perceived HRM capabilities. The analysis revealed that perceived HRM practice visibility and HRM inducements (the link between individual performance and HRM‐related benefits) were strong predictors of individual perceptions of the HR function's HRM capabilities. The use of e‐HRM and the most senior manager's attitudes towards the unit's HRM practices were also significantly related to perceived HRM capabilities.     

Student Ethical Perceptions and Ethical Action Propensities: An Analysis of Situation Familiarity

Recently McCuddy and Peery (1996) have suggested that business students may not respond the same way to unfamiliar business ethical dilemmas as they would to more familiar academic ethical dilemmas. The purpose of this study was to present the same students with both unfamiliar business dilemmas as well as possibly more familiar academic dilemmas in order to examine this issue.Findings of the study revealed that students did not exhibit different perceptions of the unethical actions performed in the academic and accounting/business ethical vignettes. However, the students indicated that both they and their peers would be more likely to act unethically to resolve the dilemmas in the accounting/business cases than in the academic cases. This finding is troubling in that it suggests that students either feel less compelled to act ethically in business, or that they perceive that ethical standards in the business world are generally low when compared to their current educational environment. In addition, the students in the study maintained the same halo effect (i.e., the difference between an individual's perception of their likelihood of performing an unethical action compared to their perception of their peers' likelihood to perform the same unethical action) across the two types of ethical dilemma.     

Facilitating conditions for boundary-spanning behaviour in governance networks

This article examines the impact of two facilitating conditions for boundary-spanning behaviour in urban governance networks. While research on boundary spanning is growing, there is little attention for antecedents. Combining governance network literature on project management and organizational literature on facilitative and servant leadership, we examine two potential conditions: a facilitative project management style and executive support. We conducted survey research among project managers involved in urban governance networks in order to test these relationships. We found positive relationships between facilitative project management and boundary-spanning behaviour, while executive support indirectly, via facilitative management, contributed to boundary-spanning behaviour.     

Modeling a Multivariate Transaction Process

In this paper the dynamics of a joint transaction process areinvestigated. The transaction process is characterized by fourmarks: price changes, transaction volumes, bid–ask spreadsand intertrade durations. Based on a copula approach, a modelfor their joint density is proposed, which avoids forcing apriori assumptions on the instantaneous causality relationshipsbetween the four variables as necessary in decomposition models,where the joint density is decomposed into its conditional andunconditional densities. The price change process is treatedas a discrete process and specified with an integer count hurdlemodel and the transaction volumes, bid–ask spreads, andtrade durations processes are modeled along the lines of fractionallyintegrated autoregressive conditional models, which are suitedvery well to capture the high persistency, empirically observedin these processes. The model is applied to three stocks tradedat the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in May, 2001 and we investigateseveral market microstructure hypotheses in the empirical partof this paper.     

The impact of enlargement on EU environmental governance

Conclusions  Enlargement may affect the three environmental governance regimes which together constitute EU environmental policy in very different ways. The Internal Market regime is based on functional and utilitarian reproductive mechanisms rooted in structures—the institutionalisation of the Internal Market at the core of the Community and the interest of countries with low environmental product standards in harmonisation —that are unlikely to be strongly affected by enlargement. In contrast, it seems possible that enlargement will significantly weaken the environmental regime. If enlargement shifts influence in favour of countries supporting a low level of environmental regulation, this would seriously affect the power and utilitarian mechanisms on which the environmental regime is based. The highly regulated countries could no longer use the environmental regime as an instrument to impose their regulations on the remaining Member States. This would deprive the regime of its most important support base. However, emerging new mechanisms, in particular Enhanced Co-operation, may offer ways for the highly regulated Member States to maintain their superior position and adapt the environmental regime to enlargement. Finally, although the present conditions for environmental policy integration may be even worse in the accession countries than in many present Member States, this might change in the longer run as a result of the particularly good opportunities and potentially large benefits of a shift to sustainable development in these countries. Whether or not this shift will occur appears to depend less on scarce financial resources and administrative capacities of the accession countries than on a firm institutionalisation of the sustainability regime at the Community level. It is up to the highly regulated Member States, which have so far promoted this emerging regime, to achieve this consolidation under relatively favourable conditions before enlargement takes place. An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference “EU Enlargement and Environmental Quality in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond”, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC, March 14, 2002.