Suchergebnisse

As foreigners snap up farmland around the world, it is hard to know who is investing in what, and what the effects on local people might be. An international database is throwing light on the murk.

The main argument of the paper is that studying educational inequalities is based on certain ideas about social justice that are often not sufficiently explicated. Some inequalities are irrelevant or less relevant than others when we think about educational justice. The central thesis is that the operationalization of justice, i.e. selection of an inequality from a set of alternatives, is a normative decision. Different normative assumptions lead to different operationalization. The metric of inequalities and the choice of an equitable distributive rule provide a conceptual framework with which to describe how inequalities are assessed in empirical studies. As researchers are obliged to be transparent about the entire research process, they should also reveal their normative accounts more explicitly and thereby empower the reader to evaluate the theoretical foundations of a study. (DIPF/Orig.).

This paper analysis the disparities between Romanian Counties regarding the spatio-temporal evolution of rural population acces to sanitation services for pre-accession period (2003-2006) and the first two years since Romania is part of the EU-27 (2007-2008) highlighting positive or negative changes occurred in this period. Romanian counties were mapped and divided into five typological classes,using multivariate analysis such as hierarchical cluster analysis method. Each class has different values of rural population served by waste collection services related to the Romania average (expressed in standard deviations). Limited access to sanitation services from rural areas lead to uncontrolled waste disposal. Despite improvement of public access to sanitation services in rural areas compared to 2003 most of population still lack access to waste collection services in 2008. In this context, implementation of the acquis communautaire on municipal waste management is difficult to achieve in rural territory.

"The Weimar Republic is regarded by traditional research as a defenceless victim of its enemies. According to that line of thought, it did not have the means at its disposal which Germany enjoys today. This chapter will argue that Weimar was quite capable as a 'militant democracy'. The 'Law for the Protection of the Republic' gave a sharp sword to the Weimar authorities, who in turn used it to good advantage. Moreover, it is a mistake to attribute the blame for the destruction of the Republic to its political institutions or to the general population. There were democratic majorities at the ballot box long after the parliament had been excluded from its rote in forming the Reich's political agenda. A similar picture unfolds with regard to civil society and its protective mechanisms and groups. Responsibility should rest with the political élite, which systematically destroyed the Republic by what can be called a 'Four Step Coup d'Etat' . Weimar thus shared the fate of most middle European countries between the wars." (author's abstract)

We make a tentative proposal for a fate-analytic partner profile of a given fate-analytic personality profile in the form of a simple computable function. Our proposal is meant as a falsifiable hypothesis that is to be empirically validated in therapeutic practice. The function and its definitional components enjoy some mathematical (order-theoretic) properties.

In recent years, new actors from the outside the agrobusiness – the "index-oriented investors" – have entered the grain futures markets. This activity cannot be understood without considering the fact that prices for agricultural commodities have increased since the mid-1990s due to fundamental factors, both on the demand- and the supply-side. Based on this, agricultural commodities futures have become an attractive asset class for financial investors with two characteristics: first, they look for new asset classes the performance of which is not correlated with other asset classes; secondly, they believe that passive portfolio-management strategies, i.e. the "replication" of the market by distributing investments across various assets such as those being represented in popular indices, are more successful than active selection strategies. Investment in commodity futures by index-oriented investors had been facilitated by the development of new financial instruments (ETC, ETF). It has become ever more appealing as a result of falling returns on investment for traditional financial investments, such as the government bonds. However, the unconditional demand exerted by index-oriented investors on futures markets does not only lead to the reinforcement of the upward price trend on the spot market but also contributes to the emergence of short-term price bubbles (2008 and 2010/11).

"The early writings of Emil Cioran, belonging to the years 1930, deal with the problem of the destiny of Romania. The rethinking and the reshaping of the country is configured by the young philosopher in the frame of the plan for disintegrating the old Europe in the views of a new, Imperialist, integration of it. To interpret this tendency only taking into account the increasing totalitarian Europe of the 30es is not enough. The present analysis discovers other Romanian political tendencies in the same direction." (publisher's description)

"Eviola Prifti takes up the issue of the Commission as a political Leader versus technocratic manager with a sociological analysis of the institution. Her study of the Commission's internal organisation rejects the intergovernmentalist-versus-neofunctionalist debate and applies a 'microscopic' level of analysis that targets individual Commissioners. She argues that while the Commission possesses substantial technical capital (consistent with those arguing for a more managerial function), this was not augmented as a result of the Lisbon Treaty. On the other hand, the Treaty does strengthen its political capital, implying a latent potential for the Commission to exercise a stronger political role in the future." (contract)

"Center of attention in the chapter is EU trade. According to the author, this is arguably the EU's most highly centralized policy domain. It is for this reason that EU trade represents a significant case study for characterizing the EU as a global actor. This chapter examines EU trade policy with regard to its objectives, instruments, style and decision-making procedures. A variety of examples, including the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) negotiations with developing countries, will be emphasized. The author comes to the conclusion that, concerning trade policy, the EU's actions bear more resemble to a great power than a civilian or normative power." (author's abstract)

Using the Hungarian-Romanian border as a solid example, this paper will attempt to prove how borders have changed from the hard, close, exclusive border to the soft, open, inclusive frontier. We have highlighted the Hungarian and Romanian authors' scientific contributions, with a special emphasis on the members of the Debrecen-Oradea Euroregional Studies Institute (IERS), the "Jean Monnet" European Centre of Excellence, as well as on the developed joint projects. These contributions have created a certain level of expertise in the development of cross-border cooperation that could be transferred for the benefit of similar situations, arisen with the EU enlargement eastwards, such as the EU's eastern frontier on the Hungarian- Romanian-Moldovan-Ukrainian-section.

Dass Waren erst durch ihr kulturelles Umfeld Wert und Bedeutung erhalten, und beides umkämpft ist und immer wieder hergestellt werden muss, verdeutlichen die Autorinnen und Autoren in diesem Band. Mit dem Konzept der »kulturellen Aneignung« bieten sie eine theoretisch reflektierte wie auch empirisch angereicherte Begrifflichkeit für kulturwissenschaftliche Studien globaler Warenzirkulation. In the past years, Cultural Studies has begun to analyze the global world of economy, supplementing existing studies of economists. This edition highlights the concept of 'trans-cultural appropriation' as a tool for understanding cultural dimensions of modern consumption, especially when it comes to transnational economic processes. Presenting a rich variety of empirical studies, ranging from the introduction of Chinese food in the USA to Ford cars in Germany and American schoolbooks in the Philippines, the collection brings processes of cultural exchange to the fore that the post-war paradigm of 'Americanization' neglects.