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The gender gap in both employment and labour participation has narrowed markedly in recent decades in Spain. However, this decline seems to have slowed and shows a certain persistence. The solution to this problem can respond to different regulatory or non-regulatory policies. This article studies the evolution of the regulatory framework for the formulation of possible policy recommendations. We identify and quantify for the first time when, at what rate and in what regions, Spanish administrations have adopted regulations aimed at combating discrimination against women, achieving gender equality or approved measures related to the work-life balance. The study is based on a text analysis of 297,402 regulations adopted in the period 1996–2022. The indicators reveal the high degree of heterogeneity in terms of the legislation. Non-discrimination legislation was the most developed and frequent, with 11,228 regional regulations and 2590 central administration regulations adopted. We show that the volume of new regulations, mainly those related to discrimination and work-life balance, has contributed to the reduction in gender gaps. Policy actions by administrations should concentrate on these two modes of intervention. The general analysis of regulation in this area also allows for some recommendations in terms of "better regulation" policies, such as the introduction of gender equality assessments (specific regulatory impact reports). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different public agencies are seeking to draft "better regulation". Complex or poorly drafted norms are more difficult for economic agents to implement, tending to erode economic efficiency. The literature has so far concentrated on the analysis of regulatory complexity as a phenomenon related to the "quantity" of norms. This article guides the process of adopting new regulations, taking into account that norms can also be complex due to new "qualitative" reasons such as linguistic ambiguity or relational structure (references between legal documents). To perform the analysis, we develop new indicators for legibility and regulatory interconnectedness. Specifically, we construct a new database (RECOS – REgulation COmplexity in Spain) by extracting information from 8171 norms (61 million words) which comprise the regulations of all the Spanish Autonomous regions. Our analysis reveals the relationship between measures of "qualitative" complexity and relevant economic (productivity) and institutional (judicial efficacy) variables. This research shows that the new dimensions of regulatory complexity matter, yield significant results and should be taken into account in governments' "better regulation" policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper investigates whether aid suspensions can be considered a sanctions type. This aims to address the tendency to neglect aid suspensions in the study of foreign policy sanctions. Aid suspensions are routinely examined in the framework of development studies. • This exclusion can be problematic because it might be distorting our understanding of when sanctions "work", what effect they have, and under which conditions they tend to be influential. • A key highlight of the paper is that it employs an original, author-made dataset tailored to this research. • In order to test whether aid suspensions behave similarly to the remainder of the sanctions universe, it performs a number of tests looking at their impact on different regime types. • The outcome of the tests confirms our intuitions: aid suspensions behave no different from other sanctions as far as their effects on regime types are concerned. • However, intriguingly, it confirms more significance for regime types when compared with level of wealth in the case of aid sanctions, which differs from the rest of the sanctions universe. • This points to the interest of investigating further this research avenue. The efficacy of international sanctions in bringing about compliance with the goals of the sender is of interest to both International Relations (IR) and development scholars. Yet, aid suspensions receive less attention in sanctions research than economic sanctions, which may be biasing our understanding of sanctions efficacy. Since recent research has established that different autocratic types display diverging degrees of resilience to sanctions, we ascertain whether such claims are applicable to aid suspensions. We put forward several hypotheses. First, we look at how resilient different regime type are to sanctions, and then investigate whether results for aid suspensions differ from those for sanctions in general. After that, we hypothesise that wealth protects autocracies less from aid suspensions than from other sanctions because their effects are markedly harder to evade. With the help of econometric analysis, we test our hypotheses on original data that feature aid suspensions as a stand-alone category. Test results unequivocally corroborate the superior resistance of single-party regimes and monarchies. Importantly, with the only exception of the monarchic category, our results confirm the comparability of aid suspensions with other sanctions with regard to their effects on different regime types, corroborating that their marginal role in sanctions scholarship is unwarranted. A final test on the role of target prosperity uncovers an intriguing nuance: affluence strengthens target resistance to foreign policy sanctions but not to aid suspensions. This confirms our evasion hypothesis: while alternative trade routes can offset a ban on trade with a set of senders, substitute donors are rare. We conclude with some implications for further study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]