Enhanced Cooperation: the Ultimate Challenge of Managing Diversity in Europe

Diversity in the EU has always been a permanent factor accompanying the European integration process. With the recent enlargement and those in the pipeline this diversity will grow, bringing the ultimate challenge for the continuity and feasibility of the integration process: the management of this increasing variety. The mechanism of enhanced cooperation was established in the Amsterdam Treaty to provide a solution to this challenge. The following article sheds some light on the future utilisation of this mechanism and its consequences and repercussions for the European integration process.*This article was written while the author was a researcher in the Department of International Relations and European Studies, Central European University, Budapest. The paper expresses the personal opinions of the author.     

Pop‐management literature: popular business press and management culture in Brazil

As in other emerging countries, the 1990s in Brazil were characterized by profound economic changes. The business press reflected and influenced this process. Newspapers and magazines grew and assumed an important role, disseminating values associated with neoliberalism and managerialism. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the understanding of the content produced by this media and how the readership reacts to this content. To accomplish these objectives, we used the method of fantasy theme analysis (Bormann, 1972) to analyze four business magazines, and we discuss how Brazilian culture mediates the assimilation of foreign ideas and managerial expertise. Our study also helps to understand how the pop‐management literature, disseminated by the business press, echoes and reinforces managerialism and management culture. Copyright © 2008 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Patterns of university–industry interactions in Brazil: an exploratory analysis using the instrumental of graph theory

The article seeks to explore the evidence related to the sectoral patterns of structuring of the university–industry relations in Brazil, departing from the information extracted from the database of the Brazil Survey Research, with the analytical contribution of graph theory and its centrality measures. The empirical results allow us to identify some important constraints of the university–industry interactions in Brazil. In particular, we highlight the importance of locational aspects in conditioning the actions of universities as producers of science and technology for the productive sector and a tendency to relatively more intense interaction with less knowledge-intensive sectors, compared to so-called science based sectors.     

International Sister-Cities: Bridging the Global-Local Divide

With the demise of the sharp urban-rural divide as a framework for urban analyses, debates have arisen regarding the utility of the city as a theoretically significant construct. Recently however, the growing emphasis on globalization has brought the analysis of global cities into sharp focus. The countervailing trend emphasizes the significance of "the local." International sister-cities provide a site of analysis which illustrates the global-local interface and yet delves deeper. Initially conceived as a post-war means of developing friendships and cultural ties, sister-cities were based on similarities such as name or economic function. More recently, greater recognition has been given to the economic foundations and benefits of these connections. Providing an extension to an integrated approach to the study of sister-cities based on the multifold relationship between culture and commerce, this paper adds a further dimension by focusing on simultaneously operating multi-level entrepreneurial partnerships necessary to sustain active sister-city relationships. Drawing on New Zealand examples of twinning arrangements, it is demonstrated that the emergence and development of embedded partnership ties is vital to deriving sustainable economic and social benefits. While the global outreach of the sister-cities phenomenon appears to transcend the geographic confines of cities, strong locality considerations and local activism nevertheless predominate. A novel feature of this paper is the conceptualization of a hybrid form of entrepreneurialism, "municipal-community entrepreneurship," which is argued as a valuable facilitator of the economic and social vibrancy of cities. to the two cities, it is broadening out to include cultural and work exchanges.     

Technological Centers as a Negotiated Context to Combine Technological Capabilities

Recent perspectives on a capabilities view of the firm often recognize the need for firms to develop an external organization. From a relational view of the industry, the external organization may include economic and non-economic exchange relationships. The decision to combine both types of relationships and its relevance for the firm can be linked to their role for accessing, generating and diffusing knowledge. More often than not, these decisions are however not unilateral. This paper discusses the potential role that Technological Centers (TC’s), created by the collective initiative of some local firms, can play as part of firms’ external organizations and emphasizes TC’s role in connecting economic and non-economic exchange relationships. It is further suggested that the diverse motives and benefits perceived by firms in relating in and across the TC’s and, in general, the relevance of sharing experiences within these contexts, should be seen in the wider context of firms’ specific and idiosyncratic trajectories.     

Fat tails,VaR and subadditivity

Financial institutions rely heavily on Value-at-Risk (VaR) as a risk measure, even though it is not globally subadditive. First, we theoretically show that the VaR portfolio measure is subadditive in the relevant tail region if asset returns are multivariate regularly varying, thus allowing for dependent returns. Second, we note that VaR estimated from historical simulations may lead to violations of subadditivity. This upset of the theoretical VaR subadditivity in the tail arises because the coarseness of the empirical distribution can affect the apparent fatness of the tails. Finally, we document a dramatic reduction in the frequency of subadditivity violations, by using semi-parametric extreme value techniques for VaR estimation instead of historical simulations.     

The political economy of public research investment and commodity policies in agriculture: an empirical study

The paper tests a political economy theory of simultaneous government decision‐making on income redistribution through commodity policies and on public research investment in agriculture. We use data from 37 countries on agricultural protection and public agricultural research expenditures (PARI). The empirical results are consistent with the political economy hypotheses. The analysis suggest that structural changes in the economy have important effects on the political incentives for governments not only to subsidize or tax farmers, but also to invest in public agricultural research. Furthermore, the analysis supports the hypotheses that the impact of such structural changes on government decision‐making on PARI is non‐linear and conditional on other factors. Regarding the impact of political institutions, the results suggest that more democracy neither leads to more distortionary transfers (agricultural protection), nor to lower investment in public goods (PARI). ©2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.