Suchergebnisse

The European Union (EU) association framework provides European businesses with an entry advantage into the associated countries by facilitating production links and encouraging institutional convergence. It is believed that this has multiple beneficial effects for the associated countries, including ones related to productivity spillovers accruing to domestic firms. However, no empirical evidence exists to show that the presence of European firms produces larger productivity spillovers in recipient economies compared to firms from other world regions. We examine this question using firm-level data covering 28 transition countries over the period 2002–2009. We estimate the intra-industry productivity effects of foreign ownership and examine how these differ across regional blocks (Central and Eastern Europe, South East Europe and European Neighbourhood Policy), by origin of investor (EU15 versus non-EU15), across geographical scales (national versus regional) and for different types of locations (capital-city regions versus the rest). Our results suggest that investments of EU origin play a distinctive role, helping raise domestic productivity in the associated countries unlike investments from outside the EU. However, this process operates in a spatially selective manner, potentially enhancing regional disparities and spatial imbalances. This assigns a particular responsibility for EU policy to devise interventions that will help redress these problems within its existing association framework.

Despite the interest in the issue of labour market flexibility, there is markedly little research attempting to measure, let alone evaluate, the extent to which flexible labour arrangements have penetrated labour relations in the UK and elsewhere. One of the implications of this is that little is known about the specific forms that labour market flexibility takes across and within each country. Given this, it comes as little surprise that the discussion about the link between globalization and flexibility has remained largely theoretical, with only a few references to usually incidental anecdotal evidence. This article exploits a unique set of labour market flexibility indicators that have been developed at the regional level for the UK over the period 1979-98 and examines empirically the relationship between globalization and flexibility. Through a spatial-temporal exploratory analysis, significant patterns of geographical and functional specialization (in levels and types of flexibility) are identified and then related to local structural factors and demand conditions and to global influences. Global forces are found to have played a significant role for the patterns observed. The implications of this finding are discussed in the concluding section.

Does employment flexibility facilitate cross-regional adjustments via labour mobility? Or is it instead a hinderance to cross-regional equilibration in the labour market? We examine this, drawing on a sample of 11 European countries belonging to different 'varieties' of European capitalism. We identify two opposing potential effects of employment flexibility on outmigration (a negative necessitating effect and a positive facilitating effect) and provide original evidence on the ways in which employment flexibility impacts of the responsiveness of inter-regional outmigration to regional unemployment. We find that employment flexibility is at large associated with less cross-regional adjustability. This is especially so for numerical aspects of flexibility (non-standard forms of employment contracts) and more true for countries in the European south and Scandinavia; while for internal aspects of employment flexibility (irregular hours and patterns of work), as well as for countries of the Continental 'variety' (coordinated market economies), employment flexibility appears to be more synergetic to cross-regional adjustability (via outmigration). We draw implications for our understanding of cross-regional equilibration and for labour market and wider EU policies.

Is there an economic premium from state independence? We shed light on this question by analysing the unique historical case of the peaceful separation of Serbia and Montenegro in 2006—the last fully recognised internationally state-disintegration on European soil. Using the synthetic control approach, we find that independence for the seceding country (Montenegro) had a sizeable but transitory positive effect, boosting GDP per capita in the period immediately following independence, but with gains slowly evaporating in the longer period—which we attribute to increased vulnerability of the newly independent state to fluctuations in the international economic environment. In contrast, for Serbia, we find no evidence of an independence dividend. While these results are context-specific, the resemblance of Serbia and Montenegro's case with the contemporaneous independence movements in Europe, namely in the realm of policy autonomy pre-separation, provide insights on possible economic outcomes of secessions on the national and supra-national level in Europe.