Suchergebnisse

Immigration has become one of the most divisive political issues in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and several other Western countries. We estimate the impact of immigration on voting for far-left and far-right candidates in France, using panel data on presidential elections from 1988 to 2017. To derive causal estimates, we instrument more recent immigration flows by past settlement patterns in 1968. We find that immigration increases support for far-right candidates and has no robust effect on far-left voting. The increased support for far-right candidates is driven by low educated immigrants from non-Western countries.

Immigration has become one of the most divisive political issues in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and several other Western countries. We estimate the impact of immigration on voting for far-left and far-right candidates in France, using panel data on presidential elections from 1988 to 2017. To derive causal estimates, we instrument more recent immigration flows by past settlement patterns in 1968. We find that immigration increases support for far-right candidates and has no robust effect on far-left voting. The increased support for far-right candidates is driven by low educated immigrants from non-Western countries.

Immigration has become one of the most divisive political issues in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and several other Western countries. We estimate the impact of immigration on voting for far-left and far-right parties in France, using panel data on presidential elections from 1988 to 2012. To derive causal estimates, we instrument more recent immigration flows by past settlement patterns in 1968. We find that immigration increases support for far-right candidates and has no robust effect on far-left voting. The increased support for far-right candidates is driven by low-skilled immigrants from non-Western countries.

The paper provides an explanation for widespread student employment in Russia. The main difference between Russia and Western countries is considered to be the following: student employment during the period of studying is widely used as a signal about the quality of human capital for the future employer. The authors show that in Russia more productive students start working earlier and employment is more often connected with the future profession than in the Western countries. They suggest that the system of communication between education structures and employers should be established in order to inform the latter about the quality and features of education acquired.

With the end of the Cold War, Europe stands at a crossroad. Today's quest is for a new security order which will provide lasting stability. After the First World War, and again after the Second World War, the Western European states faced a similar problem. Bringing together the work of twenty historians from eight countries, this book examines the security policies developed after each of the two world wars. It asks what ideas shaped them and what difficulties they faced. Continuities and discontinuities are traced and particular attention is paid to the question of how Western Europe achieved a new stability in the 1950s. The contributors deal with foreign policy, political and economic challenges, the impact of new military technologies and strategies, and the aims of the peace movement and the trade unions.

Under what conditions do governments, employers, and unions enter formal policy agreements on incomes, employment, and social security? Such agreements, widely known as social pacts, became particularly prominent during the 1990s when European economies underwent major adjustment. This article seeks to explain national variation in adjustment strategies and specifically why concerted agreements were struck in some countries but not in others. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 14 European countries is employed to assess main arguments about the emergence of pacts. The analysis yields two key findings. First, although prevailing arguments emphasize Economic and Monetary Union—related pressures, or alternatively unemployment, these factors were neither necessary nor in themselves sufficient for pacts to materialize. Rather, a high economic "problem load" appears to be causally relevant only when combined with particular political and institutional conditions, namely, the prevalence of electorally weak governments and/or an intermediate level of union centralization. Second, the analysis refines existing multicausal explanations of pacts by demonstrating three distinct, theoretically and empirically relevant causal pathways to concerted agreements.

Paper presented at: The Sixth Conference of the European Historical Economics Society (EHES), Istanbul, September 9-10, 2005 ; Securities markets in Continental Europe remained relatively underdeveloped throughout the 20th century as compared with those of Anglo-Saxon countries. The "law and finance" strand of literature argues that their secular stagnation can be traced back to legal origins and explained in terms of path dependency. Recent studies, however, provide ample evidence that the long-term development pattern of securities markets in Europe was not monotonical, but rather followed the ebb and flow of globalization. In fact, capital markets were well developed in a number of civil law countries on the eve of WW1. According to Rajan and Zingales, a "Great Reversal" occurred in the interwar period, from which financial markets did not fully recover until the 1990s. The paper argues that this view of a long-term U-shaped pattern does not reflect accurately the historical experience of European securities markets. In fact, a W-shaped pattern can be observed: securities markets noticeably recovered in the 1960s, only to be marginalized again in the 1970s and early 80s, until financial reforms allowed them eventually to thrive later in the same decade. The paper explains this post-war reversal with the rise of encompassing regimes of financial repression in many Western European countries, of which the underdevelopment of securities markets was one, but hardly the only facet. An index measuring the intensity of financial repression, covering both banking intermediation and capital markets, is constructed for a panel of 16 European countries in the period 1950-1991. The determinants of financial repression are then empirically assessed by using panel data which control for a wide set of fiscal, institutional and political variables. Results point to a public finance explanation of the reversal, according to which financial repression was basically motivated by governments' attempt to impose implicit taxation on domestic currency- and debt-holders, including their banking systems.

West African agriculture rice production represents only 50% of consumers' needs in the sub-region. The on-going negotiation on the Agreement on Agriculture and the establishment of a custom union within the ECOWAS offer an opportunity to reopen the discussion on the possible impact of appropriate trade regulation to stimulate the development of the domestic rice value chain. The poster is based on the review of the outcome of recent studies and national statistics, comparing the rice sector history across different West African countries. Policy measures have been determinant for the expansion of rice imports. But even when restrictions on imports or high tariffs have been implemented, their effect on local production stimulation has been limited. Indeed the competitiveness of domestic rice production does not depend only upon the cost efficiency of rice producer. It is adversely affected by the performance of the post-harvest operations which does not allow domestic product to match the quality of imported rice in terms of homogeneity and cleanliness. Consumers are ready to pay for a higher price for imported clean and well packed rice. Therefore the design of appropriate trade regulation cannot be limited to a discussion on the level of tariff to be applied by the ECOWAS custom union. Trade regulation could be used as buffer mechanisms to mitigate the negative impact of unpredictable world rice market trends on the willingness of private entrepreneur to invest in rice marketing and processing improvement.

"Why is there not an adequate and efficient answer to climate change?" is a question that has been haunting millions of people around the world for the last decades, and that is growingly being made by all publics. Despite the scientific consensus on climate change, the necessary measures to deter this phenomenon are still far from the speed and range necessary to effectively address it (when there are any measures at all). Metanarratives are the grand histories that humankind tells itself to guide its practices and actions. They either work towards solving this civilisational crisis or to stop any effective solutions. The current metanarrative of globalised capitalist positivism is one of the main obstacles to stopping the climate crisis, but there is a conflict of metanarratives in the world today, and new possibilities are coming into existence. Potential future metanarratives for a different climate will either be survival of the fittest or civilising tools when human civilisation is in its most dangerous moment. The current metanarrative underpins capitalist dominance and is perpetuated through capitalist ideology and hegemony, locking humanity into a path of irreversible climate change. The unavoidable systematic change needed to effectively tackle climate change will go as deep as the social construction of what "human nature" is and what relations humans have to each other and the environment. Through an adaptation of Michael Burawoy's extended case method a methodology has been developed to evaluate the appearance of a new climate change metanarrative articulated with social justice, a climate justice potential metanarrative. A historical study on the evolution of public policy and climate policy in particular for three countries in the western mediterranean - Portugal, Spain and Morocco - was conducted. A revision of information about each of the countries, focusing on the evolution of climate and future scenarios, as well as social, economical, political and industrial tendencies, was done. There were ...

Abstract
Atonement is a state practice that comprises an official political apology and the offer of reparation payments to former victims of mass atrocities, war crimes, and human rights abuses. Despite being considered the moral and right thing to do, atonement has occurred only once at the state level: between West Germany and Israel in 1952. Whereas existing explanations view the West German pathway after the Holocaust as either an ethical choice or a domestic policy induced by U.S. pressure, atonement can also be a political decision. Politicians may give official apologies and pay reparations because such practices promise tangible political benefits. An investigation of the West German–Israeli case and a comparison with two non-atoning perpetrators of World War II, Austria and Japan, illustrate the plausibility of these claims. Atonement emerged as a bilateral strategy between West Germany and Israel because it represented a politically expedient option for both countries. This finding offers insights into when politicians may pursue atonement in other cases and points to a potential avenue toward long-term international stability and durable peace.

Trust is an essential element for effective social cohesion and a correct expression of the principles of representative democracy. In many countries of the Western world, we are witnessing the advance of anti-establishment political movements and a steady decline of trust in institutions. Crisis, perception of crisis, climate of opinion around it have an impact on political attitudes and diversified feelings (interest, trust, resentment), on political participation and on voting. Social analysts are called to deepen the reasons for the variability of these phenomena according to socio-cultural contexts and individual characteristics. The main aim of this paper is to analyse: (1) if and how much the spread of trust in institutions is different among the EU citizens and (2) what are the determinants of trust, deepening the intensity and the direction of the relationships with subjective and objective indicators. Our purpose is to outline the differences among the EU countries regarding trust in national and international institutions, simultaneously considering macro (country) and micro (individual) level of analysis by using a multilevel approach. The empirical analysis is based on the data collected by European Social Survey (ESS-Round 8) in 2016 (microdata) and on some variables (macrodata) taken from other statistical sources (Eurostat, Transparency International). The sample of individuals counts about 37 thousand subjects. Data analysis includes the construction of synthetic indices, using appropriate synthesis methods, and the identification of the determinants of Trust in Institutions, considering both micro and macro level explanatory variables, resorting to Multilevel Regression.

The 20th century has witnessed an increase in the female participation force in Western countries, especially since 1940s. Explanations behind the more intensive use of female labour are of different nature: globalization forces, the relative female/male wage linked to an increase in education and productivity, the tertiarization of the economy, and other institutional and cultural factors that allow women to control fertility, invest in assets other than the family ones and alter female bargaining power. Since these phenomena are complex and might respond to specific reasons and timing in different countries, it is important to advance on country case studies in a comparative basis. While in other Western countries the increase in female labor participation started to be significant in the 1960s and 1970s, Spanish female activity rates started to rise dramatically in the 1980s, concurrently with the deep integration of Spain in international markets, especially through the entry in the European Union in 1986. In this paper, we will analyze the reasons behind the decalage in female labor force participation in Spain after WWII in comparison with other Western countries, and the subsequent catching up from the 1980s in order to determine the level of influence of Spanish integration in international markets, as well as other economic, institutional and cultural factors. ; REPEC_wphaei ; Preprint