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For the past 25 years in Greece, welfare-state reforms have been the result of the interplay between domestic politics and European influences. While pension reform has been aborted, some targeted and small-scale reforms have proven more successful. Wholesale changes of the welfare system have met with strong resistance from private interests and bureaucratic mechanisms. The EU's impact has mostly been felt in the policies of employment, vocational training, regional development and, less so, social assistance. Other welfare-state reforms have remained mostly on paper. However, the Greek welfare regime is gradually undergoing a cognitive change, manifested in the diffusion of social rights, and has adopted EU-driven policy tools for consultation and decision making. Throughout, path dependence has interacted with reform dynamics, flowing from the country's integration into the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the policy implemented when it comes to establishing regional universities in a developed, yet semi-peripheral, EU country (i.e. Greece) and focuses on two central issues: whether regional universities contribute to local development and whether their location in the periphery harnessed their academic performance. The establishment of regional universities has become a widely used practice for facilitating regional development throughout the developed world, and the university's third role is quite widely accepted. The paper does not intend to question the policy of establishing regional universities itself, but rather the way these universities were established in Greece (as a case of a semi-peripheral regime) and possibly in other countries that are not in the forefront of international research. Regional universities in Greece were often established for clientelistic reasons; however, they do contribute in advancing local economic growth. These positive effects on the locality are often accompanied by a high cost for the Greek university and society itself, in the sense that regional universities have often been forced to operate under difficult conditions, thus undermining their fundamental mission (educational but primarily research). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the novel policy measures developed by the EU to deal with insolvent member states and assesses their impact on Greece's political economy. Greece represents a major test case as a recipient of two bailout loans plus debt relief from private creditors. The paper examines the degree to which EU policies have been successful, evaluates the challenges that remain after four years of reforms and traces their implications for the future of European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present effort is to connect investment with general foreign policy. That is achieved through a qualitative analysis of the perceptions of Germany and Hungary towards China with special emphasis on the case studies of the Merger and Acquisition of Kuka and the announcement of Huawei's expansion of activities respectively. The findings show that there does indeed exist a link but continuity is too strong to greatly change general foreign policy. What does change however is the mixture of the aspects that lead to the same result. This brief closes by attempting to learn from the reactions of Germany and Hungary towards China and to make some suggestions on how Greece should act vis-a-vis China so as to become more important as an actor in the international system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the process of pension reform in Greece in the context of the ‘soft’ policy constraint (on structural reform) emanating from the European Union. It argues that the EU stimulus to reform complemented a set of domestic pressures. However, the domestic system of interest mediation has largely thwarted reform. The reform process is marked by a strong configuration of institutional conditions undermining the will and capability to adapt. Negotiation reflects a game of ‘non-cooperation’, with those currently privileged fearing zero-sum outcomes and constituting powerful veto-players. Strategies of concertation have proved unsustainable, whilst unilateral approaches by government have failed to build coalitions and offer sufficient incentives. An acute problem of governance prevails, threatening Greek interests in the EU and the Union's ability to co-ordinate economic reform across an increasingly diverse membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we try to study the efficiency of energy indicators using the method of the analysis of the efficiency formula in 27 countries of EU with data drawn from Eurostat for the years from 1995 to 2014. Then, using the correlation of these data with the GDP of each country, we try to determine the energy policy of Greece as well as in each of EU countries. The novelty of this study is the division of the countries into two groups based on the contribution of industry to GDP. Our motivation for this research is the climate change and the need for redesigned policies to improve energy and economy efficiency. Findings indicate that such a quantitative analysis can provide useful measurable knowledge for policy makers in each of the 27 countries of the EU separately. The results indicate that EU policies can be smart, diversified, complementary and complete, aiming investment in the green economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to understand whether perceptions of supranationalisation of economic policy mitigate economic voting in the Eurozone. We focus on two countries with divergent performances in the Eurozone: Germany and Greece, and make use of a novel dataset, which contains all necessary items to test this hypothesis. Our comprehensive vote model shows that in both countries economic voting occurs. However, once we interact perceptions of EU responsibility with perceptions of economic performance, we obtain diverging results: in Germany, the weight of economic perceptions on vote increases when citizens assign a higher responsibility to the EU for the country's economic situation. This is the opposite of what the "blurring of responsibility" posits. On the contrary, Greek electors are in line with expectations of our main hypothesis. Moreover, in this country we also found support for the idea that only citizens with a high level of political sophistication are able to incorporate the distribution of responsibilities for the economic policy in their vote calculus. Our results suggest that the blurring of responsibility effect on the vote may not be systematic across the Eurozone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Almost for a decade now, Greece has experienced a deep economic crisis. According to the theory of economic growth, as well as the experience of other countries, the prioritization of knowledge-intensive activities might be a useful tool for growing the economy. Mass media discourse exerts influence on the public sphere and popular opinion, but in most of cases, articles dealing with research, technology, and innovation (RTI) seem to have been focused—before and after the crisis's onset—mainly on failures of the national RTI system, without considering RTI as a potential growth factor. However, the RTI sector has gained some ground in the national policy agenda, especially in terms of policy planning for 2020. It seems, though, that this should be attributed to the limited space for political maneuver that Greek governments have at their disposal to exit the crisis, which is directly related to the new policy framework advanced by the EU's cohesion policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2015 an early parliamentary election was held in Greece, amidst harsh economic conditions and the saliency of the issue of Greece’s relations with the European Union. The election, won by the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), marked a popular will for a total change of the governing paradigm and economic policies and, at the same time, confirmed that in countries that face economic crisis and have signed bail-out agreements entailing harsh austerity measures, government parties are sooner or later punished by the electorate, albeit in different degrees. In terms of systemic trends, the January 2015 election confirmed for the Greek party system an unstable process of acquiring a new shape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses and evaluates the Hungarian Presidency of the European Union (EU) during the first half of 2011. According to the article, economic crisis in Greece prompted the marginalization of the rotating presidency during this period, and the Hungarian presidency should be assessed apart from the European Union as a whole. Topics include the European Commission, the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), the Eastern Partnership (EaP), and the Lisbon Treaty (LT). Crisis management is emphasized.

In this article, we investigate the convergence process within the European Union. More particularly, we study the convergence process of the new entrants from Central and Eastern Europe and of the 15 Western countries between 1990 and 2007. Applying a panel approach to the convergence equation derived from the Solow model, we show that new entrants and former members of the European Union can be seen as belonging to different groups of convergence. The existence of heterogeneity in the European Union or the Eurozone might affect their stability as the recent Greece's sovereign debt crisis illustrates it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EMU was an agenda determined outside Greece and it represents the importation of a radical new policy paradigm. In gaining entry into the ‘euro’ system, EMU has been the stimulus to profound change in Greek macroeconomic policy. However, the developing EU agenda on structural reform highlights the dilemmas of policy-making in Athens: the uncertain political commitment; the domestic vetoes from rent-seeking behaviour; and the imprecise external constraint. Threee central questions are raised here. What were the Greek priorities and expectations at the time of negotiating EMU? How did Greece qualify for entry into the euro system?. And how has Greece responded to the post-Maastricht EU agenda on structural reform? These questions relate to fundamental issues of the contemporary Greek state: the capability to bring about reform; the political and cultural impediments to reform by consensus; and the challenges posed by deeper ‘Europeanization’. For the EU, the Greek case raises issues of relevance to the cohesion of the euro area and the management of the enlargement process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]