Search results for " Integration"

The determinants of social sustainability in work integration social enterprises: the effect of entrepreneurship

2021

Work integration social enterprises (WISEs) exist to fight poverty and social exclusion. They offer support and guidance to those at risk of exclusion to help these individuals join the labour market. This study examines the relationship between social enterprises (specifically, work integration social enterprises) and their social impact, considered here in the form of social sustainability. This article presents the results of empirical analysis of 62 Spanish work integration social enterprises using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. The article focuses on the entrepreneurial characteristics of the companies’ founders and managers as drivers of social value creation. Specificall…

Financial Integration and Fiscal Policy

2011

The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of financial integration on fiscal policy. Using an unbalanced panel of 31 OECD countries from 1970 to 2009, the paper shows that financial integration has significant disciplinary effects by reducing fiscal deficits and (discretionary) spending volatility. In addition, we find that financial integration affects the composition of government debt and enhances risk-sharing by increasing the share of foreign debt to the total. The results are robust to both de jure and de facto measures of financial integration, different measures of budget balance, and different estimation strategies.

Exploring Differentiated Disintegration in a Post-Brexit European Union

2019

In the aftermath of the British referendum to leave the European Union and the European Commission's ‘White Paper on the Future of Europe’, it is not only time to take stock of the existing literature on differentiated integration, but also to rethink the perimeters of disintegration. We argue that phenomena such as Brexit embrace forms of differentiation which trigger the need for conceptualizing differentiated disintegration altogether. This article first sketches the path of the scholarly debate in a chronological way to grasp the breadth of existing literature. Second, it discusses differentiated disintegration as a potentially new area for research. Mapping several scenarios for future…

Cointegration and the PPP and the UIP hypotheses: An application to the Spanish integration in the EC

1996

The aim of this paper is to find some empirical evidence on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) and Uncovered Interest Parity (UIP) in the Spanish case vis a vis the European Community for the period 1980–89. The main contribution of the paper is the aggregation of the variables corresponding to the countries that participate in the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System. The results support the importance of the interest differential as an explanatory variable for the short-term adjustment to the PPP. The results follow from powerful estimation techniques, applied in the framework of a multivariate error-correction model using the maximum-likelihood procedure as developed by Joh…

Trade Costs, Trade Balances, and Current Accounts: an application of Gravity to Multilateral Trade

2005

In this paper we test the well-known hypothesis of Obstfeld and Rogoff (NBER Macroeconomics Annual 7777:339–390, 2000) that trade costs are the key to explaining the so-called Feldstein–Horioka puzzle. Our approach has a number of novel features. First, we focus on the interrelationship between trade costs, the trade account and the Feldstein–Horioka puzzle. Second, we use the gravity model to estimate the effect of trade costs on bilateral trade and, third, we show how bilateral trade can be used to draw inferences about desired trade balances and desired intertemporal trade. Our econometric results provide strong support for the Obstfeld and Rogoff hypothesis and we are also able to recon…

EU Refugee Policies and Politics in Times of Crisis: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

2017

Phenomena such as civil war, protracted conflict, and deteriorating internal security, especially in the Middle East, Africa and Southern Asia, have triggered massive departures of civilian populations in recent years. The war in Syria alone has displaced over 5 million people (UNHCR, 2017a). While most of these forced migrants are either internally displaced or remain in Syria’s immediate neighbourhood, the numbers of those trying to come to Europe have steeply increased in 2015 and 2016. In each of these two years more than 1.2 million asylum-seekers submitted their asylum claims in the EU (Eurostat, 2017a), as compared to 625,000 in 2014 (Eurostat, 2015, p. 4). This represents the larges…

The 2015 Latvian Presidency of the Council of the European Union

2016

Scope of Negative Integration: A Comparative Analysis of Post, Public Transport and Port Services

2014

There is extensive literature that explains how liberalization policy deepens and widens. In the literature of European integration such reform is commonly considered to be the result of a bias towards liberalization in the treaties, thereby giving the European Commission and the European Court of Justice wide-ranging leverage to enforce such reform. However, such approaches have been criticized for being de-politicized – for failing to understand the conflicts inherent in controversial policies. It is therefore of interest to explore the scope conditions of this constitutional bias assumption in areas where liberalization policy is disputed. This article analyzes the EU decision-making pro…

THE EUROPEAN SOCIAL ECONOMY: CONCEPT AND DIMENSIONS OF THE THIRD SECTOR

2008

ABSTRACT**: In recent years a new context has emerged in Europe characterized by a larger growing Europe, the creation of a new European platform for social economy named ‘Social Economy Europe’ and an improvement in research, networks and initiatives in this area from certain European Institutions such as the European Social and Economic Committee. This paper focuses on recurrent, but needing clarification, topics such as the question of definitions, the national recognition of the concept of Social Economy and the size of this European third sector. It begins with a proposition of a conceptual delimitation of the Social Economy and of the different classes of company and organization that…

Integration and competition in the European financial markets

2007

Financial integration in Europe should affect the competition between markets and intermediaries and generate a convergence of both interest rates and margins among the different countries. This paper analyses the evolution of the convergence in interest rates and the level of competition and its inequalities among the European banking systems for the period 1993 to 2001. The inequality index used ?the Theil index- allows us to break down the inequalities so that the importance of either a country effect or a specialization effect is quantified. If the former effect dominates it would mean that the national banking markets are segmented as a consequence of the existence of obstacles or barr…