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This article examines the causes of and responses to Europe's economic, monetary, and political crises as well as their implications on Europe's position in the global economic order and its ability to shape governance of the international political economy. Europe is in the midst of a quadruple crisis of economic stagnation, debtfiscal- monetary challenges, national and regional political squabbling, and an increasingly weaker position and competitiveness in the global economy. The pessimism over Europe's current condition is well founded as are dire predictions regarding its future if there is little or no economic growth, fiscal and monetary reforms are not well implemented or supported, and greater solidarity amongst the members of the European Union is not rediscovered. Yet some of the glaring issues facing Europe can be addressed through adaptive policy regimes, positive political leadership and cooperation that would relieve some of the stress upon the short and long-term viability and sustainability of the European economic models. Nonetheless, the impact on Europe's position in the global economy has been and will likely be permanently altered and weakened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The aim of this paper was to investigate the association between health, social position, social participation and the welfare state. Extending recent research on the social consequences of poor health, we asked whether and how welfare generosity is related to the risk of social exclusion associated with combinations of poor health, low education and economic inactivity. Methods: Our analyses are based on data from the European Social Survey, round 3 (2006/7), comprising between 21,205 and 21,397 individuals, aged 25--59 years, within 21 European welfare states. The analyses were conducted by means of multilevel logistic regression analysis in STATA 12. Results: The results demonstrated that the risk of non-participation in social networks decreased as welfare generosity increased. The risk of social exclusion, i.e. non-participation in social networks among disadvantaged groups, seldom differed from the overall association, and in absolute terms it was invariably smaller in more generous welfare state contexts. Conclusions: The results showed that there were no indications of higher levels of non-participation among disadvantaged groups in more generous welfare states. On the contrary, resources made available by the welfare state seemed to matter to all individuals in terms of overall lower levels of non-participation. As such, these results demonstrate the importance of linking health related social exclusion to the social policy context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at briefly surveying the evidence of outsourcing, considering its impact on the labour market in advanced economies. On the base of the process definition, a tentative assessment of the overall impact of trade with low wage economies is proposed and after that the article addresses two policy-related issues: through which channels does trade with low wage countries (according to a broad definition of outsourcing) impact the labour market? And what are ultimately the patterns of international specialisation after outsourcing has taken place? The three conclusions are that outsourcing is the clue to understand the observed changes in labour demand; that product upgrading, and reshaping of production processes on an extended European basis, has preserved European competitiveness; and that top range varieties produced at low cost thanks to outsourcing have been key to such competitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Globalization has attained a prominent place on the sociological agenda, and stratification scholars have implicated globalization in the increased income inequality observed in many advanced capitalist countries. But sociologists have given much less attention to a different yet increasingly prevalent form of internationalization: regional integration. Regional integration, or the construction of international economy and polity within negotiated regions, should matter for income inequality. Regional economic integration should raise income inequality, as workers are exposed to international competition and labor unions are weakened. Regional political integration should also raise income inequality, but through a different mechanism: political integration should drive welfare state retrenchment in market-oriented regional polities as states adopt liberal policies in a context of fiscal austerity. Evidence from random-effects and fixed-effects models of income inequality in Western Europe supports these arguments. The results show that regional integration explains nearly half of the increase in income inequality in the Western European countries analyzed in this article. The effects of regional integration on income inequality are net of several controls, including two established measures of globalization, suggesting that a sociological approach to regional integration adds to our understanding of rising income inequality in Western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]