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Although the movement of people from rural to urban areas has caused the increased use of energy, the abundance of water resources can be made into a form of renewable energy known as hydroelectricity. As European countries are ranked as the first users and exporters of hydropower, the production of renewable energy in developed countries such as the Nordic region has caused great impacts on economic growth and human development. The importance of this paper is to investigate the relationship between hydroelectricity and the Human Development Index by depending on some variables such as urbanization, rule of law, corruption, trade openness, and GDP per capita from 2002 to 2021 in Nordic countries. The results were estimated depending on impulse response function after conducting the Vector autoregressive model (VAR) model and Granger causality test. Results showed a negative impact from hydro plants in the short run but a significant positive impact in the long run in Nordic countries. The long-term sustainment of Human Development Index (HDI) is due to policies limiting the immigration of labor as well as protection of energy use. Water batteries are gaining popularity across Europe and their implementation is near mandatory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southern European countries are widely considered a distinct type of capitalism, but they have experienced a varied growth performance, both over time and across countries. This paper investigates the growth drivers in southern Europe since the mid-1990s. We consider a broad set of potential growth drivers derived from the literature on Mediterranean capitalism and Comparative Political Economy more broadly. On the demand side, these include the role of house prices (as the main financial variable; highlighted in parts of the growth models approach); the 'financial curse' hypothesis (which posits that financial inflows caused house price booms and crowded out manufacturing activities); and Keynesian arguments on the impact of fiscal policy. On the supply side, these encompass the cost competitiveness argument (consistent with mainstream economics and the Varieties of Capitalism approach), research-led technological change; and neo-structuralist arguments regarding the productive capacity. We find strong evidence for the growth contributions of house prices and fiscal policy. While these findings are generally supportive of extant analysis of these economies as finance-led rather than export-led, they call for a more serious integration of house prices in growth model analysis and for a more systematic analysis of the growth impact of fiscal policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stefan Eich's The Currency of Politics reconstructs and contextualises the monetary understanding of some of the most renowned political thinkers in history. By contextualising each author's conceptualisation (subjective perception) against their respective contemporary monetary frameworks (objective institutional dimension), Eich elaborates a narrative composed of cumulative layers leading to a double conclusion: that money is political at its core, and that current policies are actively de-politicizing money. These relevant findings are the point of departure of a reflection on the role that law, and constitutional theory in particular, must play in the configuration of Europe's common currency to overcome some of the most acute difficulties the process of integration is currently experiencing. If the triad law, money and public discourse is supposed to articulate social life in the polity, European monetary integration has neutralised them by neglecting the relevance of one of their key features: civic reciprocity. Reactivating the three mechanisms of social integration requires an exercise of constitutional imagination able to integrate interdisciplinary knowledge about money within an institutional framework able to prevent the concentration of unlimited power in unaccountable institutions and to promote and fully exploit the democratic potential of money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public banks have played an important role in financing public water and sanitation services in Europe for over a century, but these activities have been largely ignored in the academic literature. This special issue is an initial corrective to this research gap, providing conceptual insights and empirical information on eight countries and regions in Europe, covering a wide range of public banks working with public water operators. This introductory article provides background rationale for the research, outlines our methodologies, frames the theoretical potentials of public banks in the water sector, highlights key findings and points to future possible research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of the American financial services remains a bit of a puzzle. The standard approach, the deregulation hypothesis, posits that the industry expanded in response to national deregulation. Yet, when viewed in a comparative context, US finance was deregulated significantly less than other national financial systems and yet grew significantly more than most. We propose the global deregulation hypothesis as a solution to this puzzle. The hypothesis posits that American finance grew in response to deregulation in Europe and the emerging market economies. The article develops two theoretical mechanisms that link global deregulation to US financialization. It reports statistical tests that support two central implications of the global deregulation hypothesis. First, global deregulation is positively associated with the growth of US financial services, while US deregulation is not. Second, global deregulation is not systematically related to the growth of financial services in other industrial democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies displace labor from routine tasks, raising concerns that labor is racing against the machine. We develop an empirically tractable task-based framework to estimate the aggregate employment effects of routine-replacing technological change (RRTC), along with the labor and product demand channels through which this aggregate effect comes about, focusing on the role of inter-regional trade. While RRTC has indeed had strong displacement effects in Europe between 1999 and 2010, it has simultaneously created new jobs through increased product demand, resulting in net employment growth. However, the distribution of gains from technological progress matters for its job-creating potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the relationship between education, digitalization, and financial development between 1996 and 2019 with the aim of showcasing the differences between developed and emerging economies in Europe. We use a Bayesian VAR framework that includes variables related to education, digitalization, and financial development, as well as several endogenous variables to control for differences between countries in terms of nominal GDP growth, unemployment rate, and trade openness. Our findings clearly demonstrate the dynamic interdependence between financial development—including its two main components, financial institutions, and financial markets, digitalization, and education. Furthermore, we find that education is a leading variable in the financial development–education–digitalization nexus, whereas financial development and digitalization are laggard variables. These findings open possibilities for influencing joint policies on digitalization, education, and financial development, particularly in emerging European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of recent populist upheavals in Europe, nationalist economic policies challenge the overly positive view on economic integration and the reduction of trade barriers established by standard economic theory. For quite a long time the great majority of economists supported trade liberalisation policies, at least those actively engaged in policy advice or public debates. In this paper, we examine the elite economics discourse on trade policies during the last 20 years regarding specific characteristics of authors, affiliations, citation patterns, the overall attitude towards trade, as well as the methodological approach applied in these papers. Our analysis yields the following results: First, the hierarchical structure of economics also manifests in the debate about trade. Second, while we found some indications of a shift towards more empirically oriented work, quite often empirical data is solely used to calibrate models rather than to challenge potentially biased theoretical assumptions. Third, top economic discourses on trade are predominantly characterised by a normative bias in favour of trade-liberalisation-policies. Forth, we found that other-than-economic impacts and implications of trade policies (political, social and cultural as well as environmental issues) to a great extent either remain unmentioned or are rationalised by means of pure economic criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]