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showing 10 items of 1185 documents
Rurality as a Created Field: Towards an Integrated Rural Development in Latvia?
1999
The article looks at the post-socialist countryside as a created field constructed through the discourses and practices of different actors. Despite the fact that small-scale holdings are the major outcome of agricultural reform, and subsistence oriented farmers constitute the bulk of the rural population, there are a variety of other actors in the new Latvian countryside. Their interests are reflected in three competing approaches to rural development: the small farmer approach, the liberal economic approach and the integrated development approach. Although it is not yet clear which strategy will take the lead, the article argues for policies in favour of varied rural actors, the strengthe…
The leader Programme and the Rise of Rural Development in Spain
2000
In many ways, LEADER (Liaisons Entre Actions de Developpement de l'Economie Rurale) has been a very significant intervention in Spain. Prior to LEADER, rural development policy was almost completely unknown and, for this reason alone, LEADER represented a new force in rural affairs. The invitation to form territorial collaborations was also novel and local actors were quick to perceive it as an important political tool with which to tackle both the problems of rural areas and the challenges presented by the new roles being assigned to the rural world. Furthermore, LEADER has subsequently produced material, local impacts through its ability to generate investment in development projects. The…
Sustainability Reporting in Central and Eastern European Companies: Results of an International and Empirical Study
2017
Reporting on corporate social, environmental and economic responsibility has broadened widely within the last decade. The European Union is the most active region in the world in terms of sustainability reporting, largely on a voluntary basis. Most of the empirical research related to sustainability reporting in Europe has been conducted in Western European countries. In Central and Eastern Europe, only a small number of studies have focused on sustainability reporting. Little, however, is known whether how and why companies in CEE report about their corporate sustainable activities. The aim of the research project is to describe the status quo of SR in CEE, to explain some noteworthy diffe…
Measuring Returns to Education: The Case of Latvia
2015
This paper aims to measure returns to education in Latvia and place them in context of data available in other countries. The goals of this paper are to review the literature on returns to education, highlighting the measurement challenges, and, based on the 2011 labour market survey data, estimate private returns to education in Latvia overall as well as by individual characteristics. The main findings are that returns to education in Latvia are close to the European Union average, but lower than in some emerging markets e.g. Lithuania, and that there are statistically significant differences in returns to education depending on a person’s gender, ethnicity, field of employment and locatio…
European funding for reproduction research—A multinational perspective
2008
Funds from the European Union are not the only source available to the continent's reproductive research community. Each country independently sponsors the work of these scientists, but, as illustrated by snapshots in the following pages, there are huge differences in the commitment of the various European nations to tackle the challenges of reproductive biomedicine.
Educational systems efficiency in European Union countries
2011
Abstract We use the PISA 2006 results to analyse students’ proficiency in EU countries with regard to two indexes that represent the home background, viz the educational resources available at home and the family background of students. However, many factors affect proficiency and therefore, using a DEA-bootstrap, we intend to measure the efficiency of the European educational systems as capability to ensure high students’ competencies despite adverse conditions about the educational resources available at home and the family background. Results show an unexpected differentiation among EU countries. In particular, the most developed countries often show disappointing students’ proficiency d…
Culture, communication and cooperation: the three Cs for a proactive creative city
2009
The network of European Union creative cities is a powerful new configuration of dynamic, innovative and action-oriented cities, able to transform the space using their network of cultural heritage and activities. From a vision in which the more competitive cities are those able to attract the creative class must go to a vision in which the city becomes generates creativity, presents itself as a powerful incubator of economies based on creativity, culture, research and artistic production. The cities will have to invest in the experience economy, strengthening their identity. The Creative City 3.0, therefore, is an active tension, that requires a long-term vision ability, and calls us to ac…
Is Finland Different? Quality of Work Among Finnish and European Employees
2010
The issue of the quality of work-life has risen in popularity due to concerns about the economic and social sustainability of European societies. Throughout the continent, global competition, technological change and the intensification of work are common developments which are seen to affect the well-being of the workforce. Nevertheless, European countries differ substantially in terms of job quality. According to earlier research, employees in Sweden and Denmark (and to lesser extent in Finland) report a higher quality of work tasks than elsewhere in Europe. The aim of this paper was to investigate, in a cross-national context using multivariate techniques, whether job quality in Finland …
The EU-Africa Trade Agreements
2021
This chapter scrutinizes the successive rounds of EU-Africa agreements and the four-tier preference system of the European Union for developing countries, with special attention to the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA). Full EPAs and interim EPAs are reviewed in terms of the resulting country configurations in Africa and their impact on the officially intended consolidation of African regional communities. The analysis concludes that the artificial EPA configurations do not correspond to any existing REC in Africa. If they last, they will have a very critical effect on Africa’s regional economic integration, all the more as they start to be emulated in other trade agreements between Afr…
The effects of competitiveness on trade balance: The case of Southern Europe
2016
AbstractAccording to conventional wisdom, “peripheral” Southern European members of the euro area (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain) suffer from a problem of competitiveness. Since their membership of the euro area renders devaluation impossible, adjustment should come through decreasing wages and prices in these countries, which, by improving the trade balance, should lead to a recovery of previous levels of employment and growth. In this paper, the authors estimate trade balance equations for the Southern European countries, both for total trade and for the trade performed with the European Union, taking three alternative measures of the real exchange rate, based on consumption price ind…