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Migration has been a part of European societies for a long time, and has been viewed from different perspectives. However, the initial positive perception has shifted to a more negative one, especially after the 2015 European refugee crisis and the resurgence of right-wing politics in Europe. The crisis demonstrated the construction of an ‘us vs. them’ mentality with respect to immigrants, as many EU member states were not just hesitant but opposed to the new influx of migrants. There was considerable apprehension about the immigrants taking over the employment opportunities of the natives, issues of cultural incompatibility, fears about the social composition of the incoming migrant groups and the economic burden posed by the new entrants. Further, right-wing political parties were able to achieve electoral success through their fierce opposition to immigrants. The paper examines how the securitized view of migration in recent decades and the growing negativity towards immigrants due to the rise of far-right politics have contributed to the ‘othering’ of immigrants. Through case studies of several European countries, this paper seeks to substantiate the argument that the othering of immigrants has increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation can be explained by different inputs like human, technological and relational capitals. A production function can be used to determine the components of innovation, using the abovementioned capitals as inputs. Scientific activity includes the development of patents and publication of the same in specialized scientific journals, and such publications are considered scientific capital. And if we use this scientific capital replacing tertiary education as a human capital indicator, we can obtain a better mechanism for knowledge transmission and innovation in the European context. This paper empirically demonstrates the importance of the paper publication in the generation of innovations in the European region during the period 2007-11, using the economic growth theory applied to the construction of an innovation generating mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains Eco-Innovation (EI) activities of clusters deriving from 11 countries of Southeastern European (SEE) region. The study indicates that more than a half of the analyzed clusters in the SEE region have set objectives related to EI in their cluster strategies, while just a few of them primarily focused on EI. Thus, results suggest that being primarily focused on EI is positively correlated with most of the activities related to EI which are being implemented. These activities are mostly oriented towards spreading information and awareness-raising, while not towards investing 'heavily' in the implementation of EI. This study offers an outline of the current situation regarding EI activities in the analyzed clusters of the SEE region. Other findings of this paper are: first, clusters have the influential power/potential to steer companies towards engagement in EI by setting the objectives and focus on EI, and second, clusters' primary focus is related to the extent of EI's activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy transition can be defined as all the transformations of the system of production, distribution and consumption of energy carried out in a territory in order to make it more ecological. Inseparable from sustainable development, energy transition contributes to the fight against global warming, through the implementation of changes based on innovative technologies, but also and above all on new political orientations. These changes are mainly aimed at replacing fossil or nuclear energy sources with other sources of energy that are considered clean, reducing overall energy consumption through changes in practices and uses, and improving the environment in which people live. Among the stated objectives, all are of interest to the general public, but some will have a significant impact on companies in terms of logistics. The paper focuses in particular on city logistics in Europe, showing that local authorities now rely on coercive power to develop powerful sustainable strategies, including the implementation of Low Emission Zones (LEZs). The interventionism of the public sphere is an essential element of the energy transition that must be analyzed and taken into consideration to help decision-makers improve their operations management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests the hypothesis that portfolio diversification can increase the threat of systemic financial risk. The paper first provides a theoretical rationale for the possibility that systemic risk may be increased by the proliferation of financial instruments that lead operators to hold increasingly similar portfolios. Secondly, the paper tests the hypothesis that diversification may result in increasing the systemic risk by analyzing the portfolio dynamics of some of the major world open funds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To obtain "1.2 million additional research personnel" necessary to "irrigate" the science-based industries, EU stresses, it is not sufficient to increase the investment in research alone. The motivation behind several brain drain policies implemented in Europe in recent years is to stop the European brain drain and reverse it: "Europeans who have moved abroad would love to come home". This paper reviews principal 'Brain Drain Competition' policies either suggested in literature or implemented in Europe. The key strategies and mechanisms found are: making the academic system more open and flexible; improving the regulatory conditions, particularly on immigration; adapting income situations to market forces; providing tax reductions, specifically for researchers and knowledge workers; making international marketing more active, etc. Finally, the paper analyzes the effects of these policies on the brain drain in Europe by giving examples of countries that have effectively reversed brain drain and attracted foreign researchers. The case of Italy as "a country that supplies talent to Europe and the Americas" is also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main objectives of the new European research and innovation policy agenda is to favor the positive demographics (creation and growth) of European Union (EU) companies operating in new/knowledge-intensive industries. These companies play an important role in shaping the dynamism of the economy's sectoral composition, favoring the transition towards more knowledge-intensive activities and in contributing to the overall economic growth objectives and more and better jobs. But which kind of companies should be helped by policy? And how? This paper presents a literature review on the economics of research, innovation and competitiveness, focusing on the determinants for company creation and growth, and the role played by Research and Development (R&D) and innovation. It also implements a tentative simulation exercise aimed to figure out what the possible contribution of High-Growth Enterprises (HGEs) to EU job creation could be in the year 2020. Furthermore, it draws a number of policy implications to design future research and innovation support instruments targeting innovative company growth in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses VAR and space-state methodology to analyze how the recent developments in 20 European countries have modified the dynamics of structural shocks. The results not only confirm a visible progress in (predominated output fluctuations) supply shocks convergence between the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) and the eurozone, but also corroborate a positive initial impact of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) creation and European Union (EU) enlargement on supply shocks correlation. In particular, it is found that Croatia, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia are good candidates to euro adoption under condition of greater fiscal policy alignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper empirically studies the financing of investment under incentive problems. From the perspective of informational asymmetries among contracting parties, the firm does not behave as in the neoclassical framework. By contrast, it bears the restriction to access external funds, when information asymmetry is severe. After deriving the Q-model, the estimation strategy consists of specifying static and dynamic Q-equations and fitting them using a set of nine OECD European countries. The empirical regularities show that, even after correcting for the endogeneity problem and controlling for Tobin's Q, the investment-cash flow sensitivity does not necessarily behave according to the so-called upward monotonic behavior predicted by Fazzari et al. (1988, 1996 and 2000). The paper therefore supports the theoretical and empirical results of Kaplan and Zingales (1997 and 2000), Lyandres (2007), and Mansour (2009) casting doubt on the usefulness of the investment-cash flow sensitivity as a useful metric for financing constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global economy has stumbled from one crisis to another—the dotcom crash to the sub-prime crash and now the Eurozone catastrophe, making the business landscape uncertain and therefore risky. It has resulted in strategic risk in the aftermath of acquisitions abroad recently by the Indian MNCs. Coping with such crises involves pain as business entities disrupt their schedules. Pain also seeps in through restructuring when the control levers, namely, action levers, context levers and system levers are in full play. There is also a shift from national to global markets that has intensified competitive rivalry in industry. In such a situation, it may not be possible to leverage skills and products associated with a firm's distinct competencies from one market to another. It may also not be feasible and possible to serve the global market from a single low-cost location, thereby producing a globally standardized product, and then marketing it worldwide to achieve economies of scale, more so when the world economy is sluggish. Scale upon entry depends on the strategic commitment. The risks associated with commitments may diminish if a company acquires a host-country enterprise. Acquisitions, though, can raise a set of additional problems and these problems may offset the benefits. One significant feature of acquisitions is the painful exercise of setting the house in the order (in terms) of priorities, structures and processes. In a situation of meltdown or slowdown, firms are under increasing scrutiny for value creation and governance. So the roots of strategic pain can be found in strategy, management and financial well-being. Fundamental leverage points to effect transformation are cost reduction, asset reduction and restructuring. All operating units modify their behavior and routines in the desired manner in the transition period. In this paper, most firms and the Indian MNCs and conglomerates in particular are moving through the coping cycle of acquisitions and internationalization. Substantial changes come to control systems as managers begin to try and develop expectations of unit performance and work out on measures of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inner nature of Research and Development (R&D) requires a solid Knowledge Management (KM) infrastructure, since it is required that knowledge and information are shared in innovative and effective ways. KM and sharing can power innovation and drive competitive advantage, if implemented effectively. It can directly impact the quality of innovations, endowing them with bigger strength and making them bolder and more creative. KM can also reduce information bottlenecks and spark new and unlikely collaborations. The main goal of this work is to examine both the importance of KM and R&D activities, within the private and public sector, and to propose an empirical comparison between the situation in the Nordic countries (Sweden and Finland in particular) and in Italy. On one side we have state, companies and universities investing a great part of their resources in innovation, on the other, lack in terms of investments in the innovation field. The paper examines the importance of R&D activities from theoretical and macroeconomics perspectives, highlighting the connection between innovation and welfare of a country, and showing the investments flow in innovation through state, academia and then enterprises. It focuses on the Scandinavian countries and their public policies in terms of innovation. As conclusion, a practical case is proposed, dealing with what happened in Kista through an ambitious long-term process based mainly on research and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structured finance instruments were blamed to be the main reason for the financial crisis of 2007. The understanding of the motivation to originate securitization products is less discovered. Therefore, this paper tries to identify the main balance sheet characteristics of structured finance originators. It investigates the balance sheet figures for the 250 largest banks each in Germany, Europe and the US for the period 1994-2009. It identifies different main reasons for the banks in each region to securitize, that are in line with observable behavior of market participants. The US banks use securitization mainly as credit risk transfer instrument and to increase performance, while European originators focus on regulatory capital arbitrage and performance improvement. For German banks, securitization seems to be an appropriate funding tool. The proposed regulatory securitization changes like in Basel III are evaluated in this context, and will not hit the banks as hard as expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creativity has attracted the attention of researchers in a variety of disciplines. In the management literature the focus has been on how creativity emerges from the interaction between the individual employee and various aspects of management style and work organization. Prior to Richard Florida's publication of The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), relatively little attention has been given to analyzing creativity at the levels of regions and nations. In this paper, we measure the volume of creative work and link it to the national economic performance in Europe. We demonstrate that the frequency of creative work is quite different in different parts of Europe and that it correlates with national innovative performance. The results indicate that innovation may be promoted by knowledge management strategies offering employees opportunities to implement their own ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By opening the economy for foreign players to enter and compete in the market, numerous challenges and opportunities beckoned the domestic players in India. The banking and insurance sectors also got affected by this and started to reenergize their work and revamped the whole system to face the situation. They also initiated business into some new areas and as a result, both these sectors came together to leverage the opportunities available to them so as to reap the prospects of individual specializations. Thus, the concept of bancassurance emerged. It is the detailed agreement and arrangement between the banks and insurance company in which the insurance products are distributed properly by effectively utilizing the banks distribution channels. It is regarded as a one-stop shop where a complete range of banking and insurance products are made available. It originated in France and is a new concept in India and Asia, but it has its success story in Europe, the USA and Canada. This research paper is an attempt to assess the vital aspects of bancassurance and evaluate how this synergy is leveraging benefits for banking and insurance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mediterranean countries, with their specific sociocultural identities, are facing a process of huge and wider integration due to immigration of laborers from other countries. Among the integration mechanisms, migration, especially of young people, represents a crucial tool for changing the Euro-Mediterranean societies and a means of transferring and mobilizing resources across national boundaries. From the sending countries' perspective, migration experience in Europe, especially for young people that face problems of unemployment and difficulties in acquiring competences and skills at home, offers a unique opportunity of training, of knowledge transfer and brain circulation. Migration in Europe becomes a development tool when financial and social remittances (namely ideas, practices, identities) sent back home by the migrants have significant effect in transforming economies, lives and values of recipient countries. For the host countries temporary migrants can be beneficial to solve market imbalances and to provide examples of different ways of conducting business activities. The paper aims at providing an overview of actual flows of young people across the Mediterranean with particular relevance to human capital (skills and abilities) and entrepreneurial functions. Some evidence will be drawn from returnees of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries as they provide interesting examples of these dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to present the process of designing a syllabus that involves two stages: the drafting of the syllabus inventory and the revision and refinement of the syllabus inventory into a syllabus. The need for componentialization with respect to syllabus, gives rise to the accommodation of techno-scientific component, humanistic component and social English component in order to inculcate and foster an interdisciplinary mindset, and a unitive and unified sensibility so that there is no rift between analytical faculties and synthetic faculties. In the teleological hierarchy, the primary purpose of syllabus drafting is to give more impetus to holistic development of the learner, and the secondary concerns are that they would take care of the social needs as well as corporate demands. Trim discusses the aims of Council of Europe in the designing of syllabus of which he recognizes five levels of language proficiency: Threshold (a minimum level of language competence), Basic, General Competence, Advanced, and Full Potential Standard. Van Ek produces another level, a lower level known as Waystage. The five different kinds of syllabi namely, the semantic, functional, procedural, structural, and syncretic or 'multidimensional', as Keith Johnson calls it, can be adopted, and the various criteria of unit selection have to be fixed according to the syllabus type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the international intervention in Afghanistan has entered its seventh year, few would deny that the NATO's maiden operation outside Europe has run into deep trouble. The US-led coalition's combat-cum-reconstruction efforts evidently suffered from a perilous drift; the lack of strategic coherence and coordination became palpable and growing dissonance over a series of issues between the US on one hand and its European NATO partners on the other came into open during the last two years. In this backdrop, the move on the part of the President Karzai to open a dialogue with the resurgent Taliban and supported by several European states, especially Britain, which many perceived as an act of frustration and desperation if not abject surrender, further underlined the perceptional differences between Washington and its European allies on the seeming stalemate in Afghanistan. This paper first brings out the cracks within the international coalition; next the arguments of the supporters of engaging the Taliban in a dialogue are recounted; thirdly, the hazardous implications of this course of action are examined. The concluding section suggests that the proposed talks were a premature move; indeed, any step on the part of the international community to leave the war-torn country to its fate at this juncture would amount to a breach of trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a comparative study of regional experience in Europe and South Asia. The European regionalism is far more successful, mainly for three important reasons. One is the commonly perceived threat of the USSR, the second is the common urge for recovery from the losses of the Second World War. The third, but not the least important reason is that the 'regional concepts' of France and West Germany, the two biggest European states, while being different in substance, complemented each other very well. Regional experience in South Asia differs much from Europe. First, there is an absence of a common extra-regional threat. Indeed, most smaller South Asian states perceive India, the biggest regional state, as a threat to themselves. The second problem is that South Asian states continue to emphasize on bilateralism despite the formation of a regional organization. The theory of 'New Regionalism' offers another explanation on regional experiences. Europe is a 'core' region, characterized by political stability and economic dynamism. South Asia, on the other hand, is a 'peripheral' region, affected by political instability and regional cold war. Also, while regionalism in Europe poses significant challenges to the sovereign power of the Westphalian states, the principle of non-interference continues to characterize regionalism in South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenges of leading through the Covid-19 crisis have included not just remote staff members and customers but business coming to a standstill. Returning to the workplace has been fraught with restrictions, limitations and safety concerns. Leadership in the healthcare sector has been especially difficult, with pressures on already-limited resources, high infection-rates and death-rates, and increased need for total hygiene. One of our co-authors, experienced in the past as a leader of a large hospital and now advising international healthcare authorities, was facing another war zone. He had to listen to anyone with ideas of how to deal with the crisis; had considered unusual and new paths of action; had to act swiftly and with the conviction that any action was better than no action, with nearly everything based on improvisation, whilst surrounded by terrified patients and families and a lack of clarity from governments and the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European security has historically been linked to the expectations-capabilities gap of the European Union (EU) as well as the EU's role as a normative power reflected by the conscious choices made by European leaderships. Treaties have been the defining parameters of the operational ability, cognitive potential and institutional capacity of Europe to play a normative role in world politics. The Arab Spring phenomenon has illustrated the actual potential of the EU to act in unity. It has also shown that when inherent European idealism clashes with the realities of international politics, securitized idealism becomes the only viable choice. The concept bears a value-fact (security) oxymoron and is based on the need to balance security needs with the desire to spill over democracy in the Arab world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the problem of high or runaway CEO pay packages. These packages reflect substantial lapses of corporate governance by the corporate boards of directors that award the excessive pay. A combination of shareholder impotence, director self-interest and CEO domination has rendered many board directors favorably disposed-if not beholden-to overpay their corporation's CEO at the expense of the stakeholders. The study parses the factors contributing to these breaches of board fiduciary duties, and suggests a variety of mutually compatible remedies to policymakers in the US and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]