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This paper investigates the emergence of polarisation patterns in the EU during the last 60 years from a structuralist and complexity economics perspective. Based on the results, feasible opportunities for EU policy-making, which aim to counteract a tendency of polarization, are delineated. The study comprises of a historical analysis of the politico-economic events during this time and a complementary quantitative analysis of the European trade network. The results suggest that trade in the Eurozone is unequal at the expense of the peripheries and follows a pattern of "unequal technological exchange". The paper also assesses the usefulness of country taxonomies such as 'cores' and 'peripheries' for identifying the roots of polarization patterns. While it generally affirms the relevance of structural dependencies, and confirms the epistemic usefulness of country taxonomies, it also highlights three challenges - the challenges of dynamics, of ambiguity and granularity - that any such taxonomy necessarily faces, and which must be dealt with explicitly in any structuralist analysis using such taxonomies.

The aim of this paper is to study the consequences of rolling out a global corporate culture on a multinational company in order to streamline modes of communication between headquarter and local offices across different host markets in an attempt to optimise the functionality of the organisation per se. Our key focus in this connection is to understand how employees in the Danish shipping company Maersk Line's headquarter in Copenhagen as well as in three local offices in Shanghai, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur 'read' and respond towards such an optimisation process. We focus in particular on how employees, based on their 'reading' of this process, try to make sense of it in order to construct personal strategies as guidelines for how to navigating the organization to their own and the company's advantage. The key question to research in this context is what elements enters into employees personal strategies when navigating a multinational organization? To answer this question we employ a phenomenological approach as a way of exploring the relationship between organizational changes and employers' response towards them. We argue that single case studies provides us with the capability of providing deep insight into the inner workings of a multinational organisation. Furthermore, such kind of studies shows how various societal factors within a host market impact on the functionality of employees in local offices as well as on the relationship between the latter and headquarter.

Ausgehend von David Harveys Überlegung, dass räumliche Umorganisation und externe Expansion in Märkte außerhalb der EU eine der potentesten Möglichkeiten bilden, dem krisenhaften Prozess der Kapitalakkumulation zu begegnen, indem »sie an anderen Orten Nachfrage nach Investitions- und Konsumgütern schaff[en]« (ebd. 2005: 138), geht die Arbeit drei zentralen Fragen nach: Welche Bedeutung kommt Handelspolitik im gegenwärtigen europäischen Krisenmanagement zu? Wie wirkt sich die Krise auf das Kräfteverhältnis zwischen der EU und den Schwellenländern des globalen Kapitalismus aus? Und schließlich: Wie reagiert die EU auf den – in der Dissertation herausgearbeiteten – Widerspruch zwischen dem dringenden Bedarf an neuen Absatz- und Investitionsmärkten einerseits und der Verschlechterung ihrer Verhandlungsposition im Kräfteverhältnis mit den Schwellenländern andererseits? Theoretisch orientiert sich die Arbeit an aktuellen imperialismustheoretischen Debatten und unterzieht diese einer Erweiterung um Überlegungen materialistischer Staats- und Raumtheorie. Methodisch rekurriert sie auf das Konzept einer historisch-materialistischen Politikanalyse (HMPA), wie sie zwischen 2009 und 2013 in der Forschungsgruppe Staatsprojekt Europa entwickelt wurde. Empirisch untersucht sie die nach wie vor unabgeschlossenen Verhandlungen zwischen der EU und dem südamerikanischen Mercosur um eine biregionale Freihandelszone, lässt sich an diesen doch die Frontstellung zwischen der EU und den emerging economies in pointierter Weise beobachten.

The aim of this paper is to compare a social welfare (SW) indicator for sustainability with the ecological footprint (EF) indicator for measuring spatial sustainability. The framework applied follows the line of a core-periphery model of "new economic geography" as put forward in Grazi, van den Bergh and Rietveld, EnvironResourceEcon, 2007, (38) with interregional trade, agglomeration advantages and resource (land) use or environmental externalities. Welfare or sustainability indicators rely on quantitative relations between economic welfare, externalities and the integrity of (global) natural capital. We argue that these relationships, in order to be comparable, should be specified in a similar way in both indicator concepts (SW function and EF). The main difference between the two indicators is that the EF concept works with a binding resource constraint ("biocapacity") and therefore exclusively represents strong sustainability, while the SW indicator can be specified in a way to represent strong as well as weak sustainability. If the SW function is specified and parameterised as an indicator for strong sustainability, we get similar results for the welfare ranking of different land use configurations. If the SW function is specified and parameterised as an indicator for weak sustainability, we replicate the results of Grazi, van den Bergh and Rietveld (2007) that EF and SW lead to completely different welfare rankings of different land use configurations.

This paper studies Krugman's (1991) core-periphery model and extends it to include environmental pollution. We present the first analytic proof that only an even spreading of the firms over both of the two regions or a complete agglomeration of all manufacturing firms in one region are possible in Krugman's (1991) model. It is shown that, in a model including local environmental pollution, a third and more realistic type of equilibrium may occur in which most of the manufacturing firm locate in one region, but some manufacturing remains in the other.

The question of the spatial impacts of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has animated the intellectual and policy debate for a long time. At the beginning of the 1990s the rise of the Internet brought a new surge of debate: it was argued that the Internet would free the economy from the constraints of geography (Cairncross, 1997) bringing about a more even economic landscape. This contrasts sharply with the popular view of, for example, Silicon Valley, a congested area where world-class ICT and high-tech industries cluster together. In theory, geographical agglomeration of economic activities results as an equilibrium solution of a tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces. The paper discusses how the use of ICT may alter the balance between centripetal and centrifugal forces and therefore the final equilibrium solution. It shows that, from a theoretical point of view, there are many counterbalancing effects and not unique answer. The question is therefore down to empirical research. Available empirical evidences are then reported and discussed. Finally, the implications for European policies are drawn.