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Transport infrastructure has represented one of the cornerstones of development and cohesion strategies in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere in the world. However, despite the considerable funds devoted to it, its impact remains controversial. This paper revisits the question of to what extent transport infrastructure endowment - proxied by regional motorways - has contributed to regional growth in the EU between 1990 and 2004. It analyses infrastructure in relationship to other factors which may condition economic growth, such as innovation, migration, and the local 'social filter', taking also into account the geographical component of intervention in transport infrastructure and innovation. The results of the two-way fixed-effect (static) and difference GMM (dynamic) panel data regressions indicate that infrastructure endowment is a relatively poor predictor of economic growth and that regional growth in the EU results from a combination of an adequate 'social filter', good innovation capacity, both in the region and in neighbouring areas, and a region's capacity to attract migrants. The meagre returns of infrastructure endowment on economic growth raise interesting questions about the opportunity costs of further infrastructure investments across most of Western Europe. Resumen La infraestructura de transporte ha venido siendo una de las piedras angulares de las estrategias de desarrollo y cohesión en la Unión Europea ( UE) y el resto del mundo. Sin embargo, y a pesar de los considerables recursos que se le ha dedicado, su impacto es un tema controvertido. Este artículo revisa el interrogante de hasta que punto ha contribuido la dotación de infraestructura de transporte - representada por las autopistas regionales - al crecimiento regional en la UE entre 1990 y 2004. Se analiza la infraestructura en relación a otros factores que podrían condicionar el crecimiento económico, como la innovación, la migración, y el 'filtro social' local, teniendo en cuenta asimismo el componente geográfico de la intervención en la infraestructura de transporte y la innovación. Los resultados de las regresiones de datos de panel de efectos fijos (método estático) de doble vía y MGM por diferencias (método dinámico) indican que la dotación de infraestructura es un pobre indicador del crecimiento económico y que el crecimiento regional en la UE tiene su origen en una combinación de un 'filtro social' adecuado, en una buena capacidad innovadora tanto en la región como en áreas vecinas, y en la capacidad de la región de atraer migración. Los escasos retornos para el crecimiento económico de la dotación de infraestructura suscitan cuestiones interesantes sobre los costos de oportunidad de futuras inversiones en infraestructura para la mayoría de Europa Occidental. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article investigates the evolution of job tenure for the time period 2002–2012 using microdata from the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU‐LFS). Overall, the data show a slight increase in average job tenure at the EU level, which can be explained by disproportional lay‐offs of short‐tenured workers during the crisis. When controlling for changes in the demographic composition of the workforce, an underlying negative trend in mean tenure becomes visible. Job tenure evolved very differently across the EU before and during the crisis, highlighting the importance of institutional frameworks, especially employment protection legislation (EPL). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Regional Science Policy & Practice is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper analyses the relationship between trade, financial integration and business cycle synchronization in the euro area. The introduction of the euro has had a noticeable impact on European financial markets. Evidence that capital market integration exerts a positive effect on output correlation has two major implications. First, it corroborates the hypothesis of the endogeneity of optimum currency areas, whereby after joining a monetary union countries better meet standard OCA criteria; second, it provides European policy-makers with yet another reason to pursue financial integration in the euro area (and in prospective members as well). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Although the debates about access to services of general interest have been at the core of the EU territorial cohesion discourse since the late 1990s, the impact of unequal accessibility to living conditions has yet be the subject of close inspection. The paper examines the relationship between the accessibility of services of general interest and demographic and socio‐economic conditions in a specific Czech region. The analysis reveals inter‐municipal disparities and identifies spatially excluded areas. Despite the negative association of insufficient access with education and depopulation characteristics, the results suggest that demographic and socio‐economic development stems from a more complex set of factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the pattern of interactions between education, occupation, personal economic expectations and feelings of national identity and how these interactions affect public support for the EU. Using Eurobarometer data from 1993 to 2006, the results in this paper demonstrate that occupation mediates the relationship between EU support and education. It is also found that the sway of citizens' personal financial expectations on EU support is not conditioned by education and occupation. Finally citizens' personal economic expectations are not found to condition the relationship between EU support and feelings of national identity. In the light of these findings the paper draws implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimate the EU Commission loss preferences for major economic forecasts of 12 Member States. Based on a recently proposed method by Elliott, Komunjer and Timmermann (2005) the paper provides evidence of asymmetries in the underlying forecast loss preference of the Commission that tend to vary across Member States. In some cases, our results show that EU forecasts tend to display a rather optimistic picture for main economic variables, e.g. government balance, thus allowing a certain degree of leeway in the fiscal adjustment path towards the medium-term objective of ‘close to balance’ or ‘in surplus’ of the recently revised Stability and Growth Pact. Over the period of our sample, 1970–2004, this apparent asymmetry in the underlying loss preferences tends to deter prudent advice over economic policy. Lastly, we provide an analysis on the trade-off between loss and distribution asymmetries, for which simulation results show that the testing method is robust in the presence of skewness. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author argues that Europe's future industrial relations will be shaped by the resolution of three paradoxes embedded in today's labour markets, unionization dynamics, and EU policy. The first is the increasing individualization of employment relationships versus fictional 'individual autonomy' and workers' growing market dependency and vulnerability. The second centres on the deterioration of job quality and precarious workers' growing need for protection versus their low unionization and the failure of unions to reach out to them despite declining membership. The third is the EU's current market-oriented stance, encouraging employment conditions ultimately conducive to a political backlash against the EU itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Papers in Regional Science is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on the differences between relative and absolute measures of poverty as discussed at the International Conference on Measuring Poverty, Income Inequality, and Social Exclusion: Lessons from Europe jointly hosted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the University of Maryland. The author systematically compared and contrasted European Union (EU) and U.S. poverty measurement methods and their fundamental differences using the expositional method developed by M. Forster and M. M. d'Ercole. Tables showing European poverty rates by member state using alternative solidarity group medians and state child poverty rates in the U.S. using alternative solidarity group medians are offered.

Potential output plays a central role in monetary policy and short-term macroeconomic policy making. Yet, characterizing the output gap involves a trend-cycle decomposition, and unobserved component estimates are typically subject to a large uncertainty at the sample end. An important consequence is that output gap estimates can be quite inaccurate in real time, as recently highlighted by Orphanides and van Norden (2002), and this causes a serious problem for policy makers. For the cases of the US, EU-11 and two EU countries, we evaluate the benefits of using inflation data for improving the accuracy of real-time estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the uncertainty of agreement between Great Britain and the European Union (EU) on the future location of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) when the country takes its leave from the EU. It notes the position paper presented by drugs industry urging heads of states to make some firm decisions, including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKine, and Sanofi. Also noted is the number of EU member states vying to accommodate the agency, citing its annual budget and number of staff.

It is well understood that the exchange of information between horizontal competitors can violate competition law provisions in both the European Union (EU) and the United States, namely, article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and section 1 of the Sherman Act. However, despite ostensible similarities between EU and U.S. antitrust law concerning interfirm information exchange, substantial differences remain. In this article, we make a normative argument for the U.S. antitrust regime's approach, on the basis that the United States' approach to information exchange is likely to be more efficient than the relevant approach under the EU competition regime. Using economic theories of harm concerning information exchange to understand the imposition of liability in relation to "stand‐alone" instances of information exchange, we argue that such liability must be grounded on the conception of a prophylactic rule. We characterize this rule as a form of ex ante regulation and explain why it has no ex post counterpart in antitrust law. In contrast to the U.S. antitrust regime, we argue that the implementation of such a rule pursuant to EU competition law leads to higher error costs without a significant reduction in regulatory costs. As a majority of jurisdictions have competition law regimes that resemble EU competition law more closely than U.S. antitrust law, our thesis has important implications for competition regimes around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the notion of consociationalism as applied to the EU and assesses whether the institutional and procedural changes introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon (ToL) and by the management of the Euro and refugee crises still warrant considering the EU as a case of consociational democracy. Our contention is that the changes introduced by the ToL bore the promise to strengthen the consociational structural traits of the Union but that the further institutional and procedural changes engendered by the management of the Euro and refugee crises have made the behavioral dimension of consociationalism all the more necessary just as the accommodating orientation of the political elites had begun to evaporate. We support this argument by looking at empirical evidence which allows us to offer a set of propositions on the effects of the recent crises on the attitudes of the European elites towards the future of EU democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maximizing the area under biodiversity-related conservation measures is a main target of the European Union (EU) Biodiversity Strategy to 2020. We analyzed whether agrienvironmental schemes (AES) within EU common agricultural policy, special protected areas for birds (SPAs), and Annex I designation within EU Birds Directive had an effect on bird population changes using monitoring data from 39 farmland bird species from 1981 to 2012 at EU scale. Populations of resident and short-distance migrants were larger with increasing SPAs and AES coverage, while Annex I species had higher population growth rates with increasing SPAs, indicating that SPAs may contribute to the protection of mainly target species and species spending most of their life cycle in the EU. Because farmland birds are in decline and the negative relationship of agricultural intensification with their population growth rates was evident during the implementation of AES and SPAs, EU policies seem to generally attenuate the declines of farmland bird populations, but not to reverse them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building strategies for continental-scale conservation is challenging due to evolutionary and geopolitical problems. How do policy choices arise from this setting? In this study, we integrate ecological research with policy analysis to examine the problem field with a case study research. We use a violet species endemic to Europe, Viola uliginosa, as a proxy for a significant European Union (EU)-Russian biodiversity pattern and its conservation. The violet's core populations locate in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, and all populations in the EU are peripheral. The species is endangered in 12 EU member states and in decline in many places elsewhere. To analyze the choices of conservation, we gathered data on its ecology, distribution, and conservation mechanisms across Europe, putting additional emphasis on the EU enlargement and long-term site histories in Finland. We found that the survival of the species in the EU depends on the enlargement negotiations, conflicts between the EU biodiversity and agricultural policies, selection of the species to national Red Lists and the Habitats Directive, and contingent site histories depending on the conservation activities by civic actors and the member states. While the evolutionary aspect emphasizes the genetic differentiation potential of peripheral populations, the geopolitical aspect characterizes the EU as simultaneous spaces of a monotopia, borderlands, and polycentric development. We conclude that intersections between these geopolitical spaces can be used with evolutionary perspectives to identify local, European, and network-driven policy choices of conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Conservation Biology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Conservation Biology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Swiss Political Science Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The development of key competences for lifelong learning has been an important policy imperative for EU Member States. The European Reference Framework of key competences (2006) built on previous developments by the OECD, UNESCO and Member States themselves. It defined key competences as knowledge, skills and attitudes applied appropriately to contexts. Now most Member States have incorporated key competences, or similarly broad learning outcomes, into their school curriculum frameworks. This is a necessary but insufficient step towards implementation; for the effective development of learners' key competences, assessment must also change. This article focuses on the challenge of assessing cross-curricular key competences in primary and secondary education. It is based on a major study for the European Commission (Gordon, et al., 2009), which drew on information gathered and validated with the help of experts in each of the 27 EU Member States. The study's typology of assessment provides a basis for reviewing some recent developments in Member States. Present challenges and innovative responses are addressed, including 'unpacking' key competences, 'mapping' them to contexts and 'accessment' of their full scope and range. Policy developments are considered in the context of the author's work with the European Commission's Thematic Working Group on the assessment of key competences. The article concludes with considerations for policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its creation in 1958, the European Social Fund (ESF) has played a major role in supporting the development of vocational training in the Member States. However, compared to other, more recently launched, EU programmes and initiatives in the area of education and training, the ESF has not made a significant contribution to the debate about European cooperation in this field. This article argues that the ESF has made a mistake in this respect. It also seeks to illustrate and analyse the important changes that the ESF has undergone over the years in addressing the issue of vocational education and training (VET) and to demonstrate that it has substantial resources, in terms of money and experience, that can be used to adapt education and training systems to labour market requirements and to the needs of a knowledge-based economy. The article places a deliberate, though not an exclusive, emphasis on vocational education and training for young people and on the extension of transnational cooperation within the framework of the ESF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. I explore the effects of the partisan composition of government on industrial aid disbursement in 14 EU member states during the period 1992–2004. Methods. Predictions are tested controlling for the impact of international economic integration, the European Commission, domestic institutions, and macroeconomic conditions, using Prais-Winsten coefficients with panel-corrected standard errors, a random effects specification, and two-stage least squares analysis with GLS random effects. Results. Contrary to conventional wisdom, right-wing governments systematically give out more total and sectoral aid than left-wing governments. Conclusion. Partisan politics tempers national enthusiasm for a single European market, exposing market reforms to a range of restraining domestic political issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Swiss Political Science Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Objective. The objective of this article is to analyze the various components of EU health policy and to propose a conceptualization of the Europeanization of different countries' health policies. Method. Drawing on the methodology of public policy analysis, the authors identify core policies and their developments. They focus on the political processes and the stakeholders involved, and discuss future policy outcomes and their consequences. Results. The results show a two-sided picture: on the one hand, Europeanization in the health policy field primarily results from indirect impacts, rather than from direct treaty-based provisions or from a clear-cut sectoral policy; on the other hand, the EU exercises an increasingly strong influence over health policy in Member States, justified by internal market imperatives as well as public health requirements. Conclusion. The conclusion identifies a growing European health policy compound characterized by new, complex, and often overlapping responsibilities between the national and supranational levels. It conceptualizes the Europeanization of health policy as a differential, multiple, and often accidental process, the effects of which nevertheless tend to be quite systematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Swiss Political Science Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Conservation Biology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Agri-environment schemes are an increasingly important tool for the maintenance and restoration of farmland biodiversity in Europe but their ecological effects are poorly known. Scheme design is partly based on non-ecological considerations and poses important restrictions on evaluation studies. We describe a robust approach to evaluate agri-environment schemes and use it to evaluate the biodiversity effects of agri-environment schemes in five European countries. We compared species density of vascular plants, birds, bees, grasshoppers and crickets, and spiders on 202 paired fields, one with an agri-environment scheme, the other conventionally managed. In all countries, agri-environment schemes had marginal to moderately positive effects on biodiversity. However, uncommon species benefited in only two of five countries and species listed in Red Data Books rarely benefited from agri-environment schemes. Scheme objectives may need to differentiate between biodiversity of common species that can be enhanced with relatively simple modifications in farming practices and diversity or abundance of endangered species which require more elaborate conservation measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines whether and how participation within the Commission expert committees and Council working parties of the European Union (EU) affects the coordination behavior of the participants. Theoretical account of multiple institutional embeddedness; Europeanization of domestic coordination processes; Length and intensity of participation across levels of governance.

The article discusses the process of evaluating new medicines in Europe conducted by regulatory authorities (RAs). It notes on the need for a greater transparency for medical regulations which has been advocated by public and scientific communities and is significant to understand the reasons on certain procedures for a successful or failed application. It indicates that the European Union (EU) has obliged the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to disclose information of drug applications.

The above article, published online on 4 December 2015 in Wiley Online Library (), has been retracted by agreement between the author, the journal Editor in Chief, Professor Roberta Capello, and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to overlap between this article and the following article published in Belgeo, 'Paradigm change in regional policy : towards smart specialisation? Lessons from Flanders (Belgium)' by Ties Vanthillo and Ann Verhetsel. Belgeo [Online], 1-2 | 2012, Online since 04 December 2012, connection on 29 January 2016. URL: . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the issues concerning the approval of the European Union (EU) and European Commission (EC) on the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) potato Amflora, developed by chemical firm BASF AG, in EU states. Heike Moldenhauer of Friends of the Earth Europe notes his disappointment to the approval because Amflora has a controversial antibiotic resistant marker gene. However, Helen Ferrier of the National Farmers Union (NFU) cites her commendation on the decision.