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Despite its importance and singularity, the EU’s state aid policy has attracted less scholarly attention than other elements of EU competition policy. Introducing the themes addressed by the special issue, this article briefly re...
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Despite its importance and singularity, the EU’s state aid policy has attracted less scholarly attention than other elements of EU competition policy. Introducing the themes addressed by the special issue, this article briefly reviews the development of EU policy and highlights why the control of state aid matters. The Commission’s response to the current economic crisis notably in banking and the car industry is a key concern, but the interests of the special issue go far beyond. They include: the role of the European Commission in the development of EU policy, the politics of state aid, and a clash between models of capitalism. The special issue also examines the impact of EU policy. It investigates how EU state aid decisions affect not only industrial policy at the national level (and therefore at the EU level), but the welfare state and territorial relations within federal member states, the external implications of EU action and the strategies pursued by the Commission to limit any potential disadvantage to European firms, and the conflict between the EU’s expanding legal order and national.
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摘要 :
Despite its importance and singularity, the EU's state aid policy has attracted Jess scholarly attention than other elements of EU competition policy. Introducing the themes addressed by the special issue, this article briefly rev...
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Despite its importance and singularity, the EU's state aid policy has attracted Jess scholarly attention than other elements of EU competition policy. Introducing the themes addressed by the special issue, this article briefly reviews the development of EU policy and highlights why the control of state aid matters. The Commission's response to the current economic crisis notably in banking and the car industry is a key concern, but the interests of the special issue go far beyond. They include: the role of the European Commission in the development of EU policy, the politics of state aid, and a clash between models of capitalism. The special issue also examines the impact of EU policy. It investigates how EU state aid decisions affect not only industrial policy at the national level (and therefore at the EU level), but the welfare state and territorial relations within federal member states, the external implications of EU action and the strategies pursued by the Commission to limit any potential disadvantage to European firms, and the conflict between the EU's expanding legal order and national.
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Admiral William Sims' Pulitzer Prize winning memoir and history of the First World War was entitled Victory at Sea and set a high bar for the books on the naval conflict that would follow over the next century. Victory Without Pea...
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Admiral William Sims' Pulitzer Prize winning memoir and history of the First World War was entitled Victory at Sea and set a high bar for the books on the naval conflict that would follow over the next century. Victory Without Peace: The United States Navy in European waters, 1919-1924, the third book in a series by historian William Still examining the role of the US Navy in European seas, lives up to that high standard. The previous volumes in the series examined the US Navy in the era after the American Civil War and early twentieth century, as well as the US Navy in the First World War. Still's latest takes up the task of examining what happened after Admiral Sims returned to Newport, Rhode Island and how the US Navy responded to the operational challenges of peace. The book is a vital contribution to the literature on the US Navy in the twentieth century, with impressive research backing it, and a wide ranging narrative.
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Since the mid-2000s, the European Commission has employed a so-called 'more economic approach' to European state aid control. Under this modified regime, the Commission checks not only whether a state aid has competition-distortin...
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Since the mid-2000s, the European Commission has employed a so-called 'more economic approach' to European state aid control. Under this modified regime, the Commission checks not only whether a state aid has competition-distorting effects, but in addition, whether it enhances social welfare. This reform implies an extension of the Commission's competences vis-à-vis the Member States as the Commission gets the power to prohibit national state aid regarded as socially wasteful. The Commission explains its reform with the necessity of giving state aid control a sound economic basis. This article, however, demonstrates that the more economic approach - somewhat paradoxically - is not based on a consistent economic view of public policy that would justify the aforementioned shift of competences to the supranational EU level. The economic-theoretical inconsistencies identified in this article may be used by policymakers to rethink some elements of current EU state aid policy.
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The aim of the paper is to examine the changing role of the state in employment regulation in an environment that has become more market-driven and Europeanized since the introduction of the European Monetary Union (EMU) and the E...
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The aim of the paper is to examine the changing role of the state in employment regulation in an environment that has become more market-driven and Europeanized since the introduction of the European Monetary Union (EMU) and the European Employment Strategy (EES). The point of departure is a general discussion of the role of the state in capitalist development and a review about the recent debate on the spatiality of state regulation. It further suggests different ways in which the state shapes employment relations along the following dimensions: as employer, as legislator, as guarantor of employment rights and procedural regulator, in intermediating neo-corporatist processes, in macro-economic management, and as a welfare state. From this theoretical basis, the paper identifies changes in state strategies within employment regulation by comparing two periods of European integration: the post-war period and the ongoing period after the introduction of the EMU and the EES. In conclusion, the paper asserts that there has been a transition in the ways the state 'intervenes' in the economy and shapes the different dimensions of employment relations from a governing and legislating mode towards a steering and advising one.
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Purpose - Contextualizing its argument specifically into the role and impact of the traditional political culture on the process of modernization, this paper aims to examine the "culture matters" approach through the two-century e...
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Purpose - Contextualizing its argument specifically into the role and impact of the traditional political culture on the process of modernization, this paper aims to examine the "culture matters" approach through the two-century experience of the top-down modernization of the Ottoman-Turkish civilization in the realm of state-labor relations. Design/methodology/approach - The paper makes a comparative analysis of the interplay between the state and craft associations in the Ottoman Empire, and then the state and labor organizations in contemporary Turkey in terms of the influence of the rules, norms and institutions transferred by the bureaucratic elites from Western Europe. Findings - The paper concludes that a substantive democratic setting for the interplay of the state and labor organizations could not be built up without a self-supportive political culture in view of the fact that the process of top-down modernization/Europeanization in the Ottoman-Turkish context has given rise to a never-ending center-periphery dichotomy between both inter-class and intra-class relationships. Originality/value - The paper sheds light on the labor relations part of the Ottoman-Turkish political culture and reveals its impact on the never-ending top-down modernization initiative.
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The European Union (EU) is one of the few jurisdictions in the world that has introduced specific legal provisions for controlling state aid. The treaty provisions are structured in such a way that the Commission is in principle o...
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The European Union (EU) is one of the few jurisdictions in the world that has introduced specific legal provisions for controlling state aid. The treaty provisions are structured in such a way that the Commission is in principle obliged to authorize every single grant of aid. This has proved to be practically impossible, the more so with 27 members of the EU. As a result, the Commission has issued a number of exemption and de minimis rules, for which notification is not required, that suggest that the bulk of state aid is beneficial. In order for state aid policy to become more rigorous, the 2005 State Aid Action Plan rightly enhanced the role of economic analysis. This means rethinking the exemption regulations and the way individual decisions are taken. One important step forward would be to make sure that distortions of competition are noticeable before a state measure is declared incompatible. As a result, at least with respect to individual decisions, EU policy would stop addressing cases where the distortions of competition are minimal. Furthermore, the Commission would stop imposing irrelevant constraints on subsidized forms. This is particularly the case for restructuring aid, where the restoration of the healthiness of the firm is the final objective of the aid. However, even in recent decisions taken as a result of the financial crisis, the Commission uses competition-type considerations only to overcome moral hazard by attaching a number of intrusive conditions to its authorization decisions (prohibition of reducing prices before a competitor does, introduction of capacity or sales caps, merger prohibitions, caps on managers' salaries, etc.). Very often these conditions reduce, not increase, the probability that these companies restructure successfully. Moral hazard can only be eliminated by not allowing the aid, by limiting the aid to what is strictly necessary, or by making sure that it is a once-and-for-all option, and not by constraining the company from competing.
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This paper proposes a theory of competitive agglomeration-a new enquiry into the origins of hierarchical structures and governments. As a motivating example we analyze the Viking age-the roughly 300 year period beginning in 800 AD...
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This paper proposes a theory of competitive agglomeration-a new enquiry into the origins of hierarchical structures and governments. As a motivating example we analyze the Viking age-the roughly 300 year period beginning in 800 AD-from the perspective of the economics of conflict. The Viking age is interesting because throughout the time period, the scale of conflict increased-small scale raiding behaviour eventually evolved into large scale clashes between armies. With this observation in mind, we present a theoretical model describing the incentives both the defending population and the invading population had to agglomerate into larger groups to better defend against attacks, and engage in attacks, respectively. We tentatively postulate that competitive agglomeration during the Viking era was a key impetus to state formation in Europe.
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This paper examines how food practices and food narratives become tools of community building. It explores the politics of pork consumption and production in Eastern Poland, as embedded and enacted at various scales: homestead, fa...
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This paper examines how food practices and food narratives become tools of community building. It explores the politics of pork consumption and production in Eastern Poland, as embedded and enacted at various scales: homestead, family, gender relations, regional and national affinity as well as in EU and national levels. I draw on ethnographic research among the farming communities, where foodways are tied to ideas of home, work and locality. I find that pork politics takes on numerous forms there: discursive, as visible in the narratives of the symbolic value of pork to mark farmers' way of life; and performative and pragmatic, as visible in the practices of subsistence farming that immerse farmers' lives in food. I argue that all forms point to a creative response to being pushed into the "grey zone" of the state. Due to legislative and political obstacles, small-scale farmers in Eastern Poland withdraw into private sphere and barter, engage in informal food practices and take on ways of life associated with the past. In trying to uphold their status and moral worth, farmers retreat from official farming strategies, reject the values of modernity, equality and development as set out by the EU and become detached from the consumers. I propose that in the homesteads of Eastern Poland, functioning on the "borderland" of the state does not entail being excluded from politics.
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Whether by population, territory or economic impact, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are small states. In 1940 and 1944, smallness meant forced incorporation into the Soviet Union. From 1991, the Baltic states sat between two geopol...
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Whether by population, territory or economic impact, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are small states. In 1940 and 1944, smallness meant forced incorporation into the Soviet Union. From 1991, the Baltic states sat between two geopolitical spaces: one Russian and one European. After years of occupation, the Baltic states were keen to overcome their size and the dangers that are inherent in being small. Thus, in 2004 Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania returned to Europe and the 'West', a position they had held prior to the Second World War. Membership in the EU and NATO provides both opportunities and constraints, yet organizational membership also allows the Baltic states to pursue geopolitical gamesmanship in the post-Soviet area vis--vis the Russian Federation. Relying on Baldur Thorhallson's concepts of action capacity and vulnerability, we illustrate how the Baltic states have gone beyond what has been expected of small states in international politics by engaging the 'West' to negotiate with the 'East'.
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