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This special double issue of the International Social Security Review addresses the question of the essential roles that national social security systems play in contributing to social and economic objectives and does so through the lens of the Dynamic Social Security conceptual framework. In 2007, the International Social Security Association adopted Dynamic Social Security as the strategic concept to guide its actions. The concept aims to positively influence two outcomes: improvements in social security coverage and improvements in social security administration. The set of papers comprising this issue tackle questions relating primarily to the former. On the basis of country examples, the broad aim of this special issue is to take stock of the strategic concept and its 'dimensions' as a framework to guide the sustainable development of social security systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Low rates of internal migration in many European countries contribute to the persistence of significant regional labor market differences. I use the Mikrozensus, a large annual sample of households living in Germany, to further our understanding of the underlying reasons. This paper makes two main contributions: first, the paper quantifies the disutility of migrating. To this end, I estimate conditional logit models of the migration decision across the German federal states. Second, I then focus on the differences between immigrants and natives. I find significantly higher responsiveness to labor market differentials in the immigrant population than in the native population. Unobserved moving costs for immigrants are estimated to be only about 31 percent of this same cost for natives. The findings bear on the assessment of the economic impact of immigration, and the paper contributes to the current immigration-related policy debates that feature prominently in many European countries, and that likely will continue to be important in light of the ongoing EU expansion and the resulting east-west migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas initially physical capital and later, knowledge capital were viewed as crucial for growth, more recently a very different factor, entrepreneurship capital, has emerged as a driving force of economic growth. In this paper, we define a region's capacity to create new firms start-ups as the region's entrepreneurship capital. We then investigate the local embeddedness of this variable and which variables have an impact on this variable. Using data for Germany, we find that knowledge-based entrepreneurship capital is driven by local levels of knowledge creation and the acceptance of new ideas, indicating that local knowledge flows play an important role. Low-tech entrepreneurship capital is rather increased by regional unemployment and driven by direct incentives such as subsidies. All three measures are locally clustered, indicating that indeed, entrepreneurship capital is a phenomenon that is driven by local culture, and is therefore locally bounded. Mientras que inicialmente el capital físico, y posteriormente el capital conocimiento, fue considerado crucial para el crecimiento, más recientemente un factor muy diferente, el capital empresarial de espíritu emprendedor ( entrepreneurship capital), ha surgido como una fuerza impulsora de crecimiento económico. En este artículo, definimos como capital empresarial emprendedor la capacidad de una región para originar la puesta en marcha de nuevas empresas. A continuación investigamos el arraigo local de esta variable y las variables que tienen un impacto sobre esta variable. Usando datos de Alemania, hallamos que el capital empresarial emprendedor basado en el conocimiento está motivado por niveles locales de creación de conocimiento y la aceptación de nuevas ideas, indicando que los flujos de conocimiento local juegan un papel importante. El capital empresarial emprendedor basado en bajas tecnologías aumenta con el desempleo regional y está motivado por incentivos directos como subsidios. Las tres variables están agrupadas localmente ( locally clustered), indicando que sin duda el capital empresarial emprendedor es un fenómeno motivado por la cultura local, y por tanto atribuible a una localidad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the theoretical concept that a city is always influenced by the relations it has to its hinterland and to other cities. Taylor and colleagues point out that city-city relations and city-hinterland relations can be understood as two sides of a coin. Using this conception the polycentric structure and dynamics of the German urban system can be described through: (i) metropolitan functions representing city-hinterland relations (cosmopolitanity) and (ii) a network of cities representing city-city relations (connectivity). Measuring separately the degrees of cosmopolitanity and connectivity, we look at whether the German urban system after reunification has grown together, becoming one balanced urban system, and what role Berlin - as the new capital in the overall system - now has. The results of the two perspectives are compared and analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY The observation that some immigrants choose not to integrate into the host society has caused political controversies across European states. This paper hypothesizes that immigrants can exploit social networks of different scales in order to substitute for costly integration. Using a novel dataset of Turkish households in Berlin, which was specifically collected for this analysis, we investigate the determinants of integration as well as the impact of integration and networks on households' economic success. We find evidence that integration promotes income even after accounting for potential endogeneity bias. Using endogenous switching regression model, we test whether local ethnic networks can be successfully used to generate household income. In line with the view that there is a trade-off between integration and the establishment of ethnic contacts, we find that local ethnic and familial networks increase the income of unintegrated migrants, while transnational networks decrease it. Moreover, education is more income improving for integrated than non-integrated immigrants and remaining closely integrated within their own ethnic group is more economically advantageous for poorer households. These results provide evidence that integration is the rational strategy for better-off immigrants while it may be too costly for poorer immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]