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This paper argues that a high degree of conflict and a low degree of salience on a policy issue drives corporations to lobby alone rather than via a business association. Previous research has addressed drivers at organizational, sector and structural level. This paper adds an issue perspective. These arguments are important as democracies thrive when business employs its power in a responsible manner. When corporations lobby alone, it can be a challenge to do so as they tend to overlook long‐term interests of the broader business community and society. The arguments are tested for the first time in a corporatist context through an original survey experiment among corporate lobbyists in Germany and the Netherlands. The study finds support for the expectation on conflict, which is striking as it indicates that corporations prefer to lobby alone due to conflict even in contexts in which they are not incentivized to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing interest in innovation ecosystems. Embedding innovation processes in ecosystems comes with several opportunities and managerial challenges. This paper's aim is to increase our understanding of the strategies that industrial firm managers use to deal with innovation ecosystems. How do they align partners and activities while securing and developing their role in the ecosystem? Drawing on 98 interviews with CEOs, CTOs and innovation managers in Germany and the Netherlands, we identify two layers in innovation ecosystems: an explorative layer, which is open and aimed at identifying opportunities for innovation, and an exploitative layer, which is semi‐closed and aimed at enacting these opportunities to create new value propositions for customers. We analyse how companies act upon these two layers productively, particularly in relation to alignment and strategic positioning; how they create synergies between the different layers; and how they cope with the existing tensions. Furthermore, we discuss differences in strategic choices regarding ecosystem strategies, and propose a maturity model for the development of innovation ecosystem strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diverse nature of 21st‐century organizations has compelled leaders to minimize discrimination and bring about inclusion amongst their employees. One of the ways this can be achieved is through authentic, respectful, and inclusive leadership. The aim of the present paper was to (1) explore whether the three leadership styles can promote inclusion and curtail discrimination in the South African context and (2) ascertain whether this relationship has any bearing on well‐being across Dutch, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, and South African contexts. To reach these aims, two cross‐sectional studies have been conducted. In Study 1, 569 employees were surveyed, and results indicated that all three leadership styles loaded on a common latent factor (positive leadership) that was positively associated with both inclusion and discrimination. In Study 2, 1,926 employees were surveyed across the five countries. Results indicated that once again, the latent, positive leadership factor was positively associated with both inclusion and discrimination. Furthermore, inclusion, when compared to discrimination seemed to be a stronger mediator in the relationship between positive leadership and well‐being. We propose leadership development that will cultivate positive leadership behaviors for the benefit of employee well‐being and collaboration in increasingly diverse teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on several congresses and conventions to be held. The International Federation of Classification Societies is organizing its first conference from June 29 to July 1, 1987 at the Technical University Aachen, Aachen, Federal Republic of Germany. This conference is devoted to the presentation of theoretical and applied papers on classification and related methods of data analysis in the broad sense. The 1987 European Meeting of the Psychometric Society will be held at Twente University, Enschede, the Netherlands, on June 24-26, 1987.

This paper studies procyclical productivity growth at the industry level in the United States and three European countries (France, Germany and the Netherlands). Industry-specific demand-side instruments are used to examine the prevalence of non-constant returns to scale and unmeasured input utilization. For the aggregate US economy, unmeasured input utilization seems to explain procyclical productivity. However, this correction still leaves one in three US industries with procyclical productivity. This failure of the model can also be seen in Europe and is mostly concentrated in services industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the cross‐country dimension of financial cycles for six euro area countries using wavelet analysis. Estimated wavelet cohesions show that cycles in equity prices and interest rates display stronger synchronization across countries than real output cycles, whereas credit variables and house prices show lower cross‐country synchronization. We propose a wavelet‐based extension to the spectral envelope that is similar to a frequency‐based time‐varying principal component analysis. The country loadings show that, contrary to all other variables, cycles in loans to households and house prices in Germany and the Netherlands are negatively or less strongly correlated with the common cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a newsletter from the editorial office of the periodical "Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica," which discusses the journal's publication time, acceptance rate, and article contributors. The authors say that they began calculating "Acta's" publication time from its acceptance until its electronic and hardcopy publication in December 2010. They add that its acceptance rate had ranged from 15 to 17 % since 2008, with Netherlands, Germany, and the U. S. as their main contributors.

Was the crisis of historicism an exclusively German affair? Or was it a “narrowly academic crisis,” as is sometimes assumed? Answering both questions in the negative, this paper argues that crises of historicism affected not merely intellectual elites, but even working-class people, not only in Germany, but also in the Netherlands. With an elaborated case study, the article shows that Dutch “neo-Calvinist” Protestants from the 1930s onward experienced their own crisis of historicism. For a variety of reasons, this religious subgroup came to experience a collapse of its “historicist” worldview. Following recent German scholarship, the paper argues that this historicism was not a matter of Rankean historical methods, but of “historical identifications,” or modes of identity formation in which historical narratives played crucial roles. Based on this Dutch case study, then, the article develops two arguments. In a quantitative mode, it argues that more and different people suffered from the crisis of historicism than is usually assumed. In addition, it offers a qualitative argument: that the crisis was located especially among groups that derived their identity from “historical identifications.” Those who suffered most from the crisis of historicism were those who understood themselves as embedded in narratives that connected past, present, and future in such a way as to offer identity in historical terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Western countries, the scale of second home ownership increased enormously in the last decades. Yet, the outcomes of this development on spatial patterns and behaviour are unclear. In this paper we focus on two issues that arise from this trend: first, the impact of the residential environment of the primary dwelling on second home ownership and, second, the impact of second homes on travel. The paper is based on two empirical studies carried out in the Netherlands and in Germany. In the Netherlands, the owners of second homes frequently compensate for the lack of leisure opportunities at home or in close vicinity of their home in urbanised areas in which they primarily live. The same is true for allotment owners in Germany. However, Dutch non-mobile caravan owners and German owners of second homes do not follow any compensation strategies. In both countries the use of the private car is dominant although in Germany travel distances are larger than in the Netherlands. Based on a typology of second homeowners a sketch of future developments will be given. Some recommendations for housing and transportation policies will be formulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how inflation-induced erosions of nominally defined amounts built into relevant tax rules (“bracket creep”) alter distributional and revenue-generating properties of income taxes and social insurance contributions. Using a multi-country tax-benefit model, it provides quantitative estimates for Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. In the absence of automatic inflation adjustment mechanisms, effects on individual tax burdens can be substantial, even with low inflation. Bracket creep is found to reduce tax progressivity. At the same time, overall tax revenues increase. In terms of tax systems’ equalizing capacities, which depend on both these factors, the second effect dominates: if tax systems were left unadjusted then inflation would lead to lower and slightly more equally distributed household incomes. However, existing inflation adjustment regimes in the Netherlands and the U.K. successfully prevent large tax burdens changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper presents evidence that companies across three continental European countries (Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands) provide varying degrees of analyst recommended nonfinancial disclosures to the marketplace. This study is the first to examine the relationship of Jenkins Committee nonfinancial disclosure levels with the accuracy and dispersion of financial analysts' earnings forecasts. Seemingly unrelated regression tests show that larger companies and companies with a global focus voluntarily provide higher levels of both forward looking and historical nonfinancial disclosures. Additionally, higher levels of forward looking nonfinancial disclosures are associated with lower dispersion and higher accuracy in financial analysts' earnings forecasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of the 2008 and 2010 Eurographics workshops on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM). The 2008 workshop was held at the Delft University of Technology in Netherlands on October 67, 2008. The second workshop was held in Leipzig, Germany on July 1-2, 2010. The workshops' International Programme Committee (IPC) included members from the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, Austria, Spain, the U.S., Canada, Belgium abd Sweden.

Total water intake is seldom reported in dietary surveys and hydration status is rarely measured. Although adequate intake (AI) levels have been suggested by the European Food Safety Authority, the World Health Organization and the Institute of Medicine, uncertainties and confused messages abound regarding optimum intake. This paper reviews data on water intake internationally and examines associations with beverage consumption habits of adults in the UK, as determined from secondary analysis of individual diet records. On average, total water intake among British adults was equivalent to the European AI (2 l/day for women, 2.5 l/day for men) and 75% of this was derived from beverages. Factors that correlated with high total water intake included the consumption of a variety of beverages and drinking in the evening. Total water intake (and the contribution from soft drinks) is markedly higher in the USA than in Europe. Beverage consumption habits and trends were also reviewed. In the past 10 years, water beverages have become more popular and as such the overall energy contribution from beverages has declined slightly. Most people could be encouraged to drink a variety of beverages to maintain adequate hydration and to balance the energy content according to their needs. However, further work is needed to refine recommendations for water intake, as basing these on observational epidemiological data is essentially a circular argument. A standardized measurement tool, validated against biomarkers of hydration status, would be a step forward in assessing the adequacy of water intakes at a population level. Research may also be warranted to explore the context of drinking occasions (including time of day, weekdays weekends, lifestyle and meal patterns) as these may have an impact on water intake, hydration and also energy balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of warfare on social policy development has interested scholars for some time. This research has focused on belligerent countries, while its impact on neutral countries has received little attention. This paper aims to address this gap through a comparison of the development of unemployment social policies in the neutral Netherlands, which nevertheless mobilised for war, and combatant Germany. While the crisis conditions accompanying mobilisation forced these states to become involved with such policies for the first time, at no time during or after the war did they fully surrender their increased interventionist position. The state assumed responsibility for enacting, regulating and funding private initiatives and this role was institutionalised after the war. This study contributes to an understanding of welfare state development in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective This paper examines how negative experiences with the health-care system create a lack of confidence in receiving medical care in seven countries: Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Methods The empirical analysis is based on data from the Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey 2007, with nationally representative samples of adults aged 18 and over. For the analysis of the experience of cost barriers and confidence in receiving medical care, we conducted pairwise comparisons of group percentages as well as country-wise multivariate logistic regression models. Results Individuals who have experienced cost barriers show a significantly lower level of confidence in receiving safe and quality medical care than those who have not. This effect is most pronounced in the United States, where people who have foregone necessary treatment because of costs are four times as likely to lack confidence as individuals without the experience of cost barriers (adjusted odds ratio 4.00). In New Zealand, Germany, and Canada, individuals with the experience of cost barriers are twice as likely to report low confidence compared with those without this experience (adjusted odds ratios of 1.95, 2.19 and 2.24, respectively). In the Netherlands and UK, cost barriers are only a marginal phenomenon. Conclusions The fact that the experience of financial barriers considerably lowers confidence indicates that financial incentives, such as private co-payments, have a negative effect on overall public support and therefore on the legitimacy of health-care systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change increases flood probabilities in the Rhine river basin, which complicates long-term flood management planning. This paper explores a method to evaluate the effectiveness of flood management measures for the river Rhine assuming a relatively extreme climate change scenario for the year 2050. Considered are planned measures described in the Rhine Action Plan on Floods (APF) and several additional measures, which include the restoration of abandoned meanders, a bypass around Cologne, the implementation of additional retention polders and land-use change to forest. The method includes resampling of meteorological data and a hydrological model to simulate long discharge series (10 000 years), and can be considered as a process-based approach to estimate peak discharges of low-probability flood events. It is found that upstream flooding in Germany has a profound decreasing effect on the simulated peak water levels and discharges along the main Rhine branch and downstream in the Netherlands. Currently implemented and proposed measures in the APF, as well as most additional measures, seem inadequate to cope with the increased flood probabilities that are expected in the future climate change scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the impacts of CAP reforms, particularly subsidies on technical efficiency of crop farms. An output distance function is employed and estimated together with an inefficiency effects model to capture the effects of CAP subsidies and farmer characteristics on farm efficiency. The model is applied to FADN data (period 1995–2004) of crop farms in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. The study shows that the 10-year average technical efficiency is 64% in Germany, 76% in the Netherlands and 71% in Sweden. The average annual changes in technical efficiency are 0.1%, 0.4% and 2.3%, respectively. The share of crop subsidies in total subsidies has a negative impact on technical efficiency in Germany but a positive impact in Sweden, although insignificant in the Netherlands. The share of total subsidies in total farm revenues has negative impacts on technical efficiency in all three countries, consistent with income and insurance effects. Positive (negative) change in technical efficiency is mainly attributable to farm size (degree of specialisation) in Germany, and degree of specialisation (degree of subsidy dependence) in the Netherlands and Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that migration studies are too parochial, focusing exclusively on ostensible immigration and incorporation policies and failing to take into account the ‘structuring’ effects of the overall institutional framework. The need for more comparative and more economically-oriented research is presented through a reflection upon the recent Dutch debate on the causes of the lagging performance of Turks in the Netherlands compared to those in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estuaries comprise channels vital for economic activity and bars as valuable habitats. They are increasingly under human‐induced pressures (e.g. sea‐level rise and dredging), resulting in morphological changes that affect navigability, flood safety and ecology. Antecedent geology may strongly steer how estuary channels will adapt to these pressures, but is surprisingly absent in most models. Here geological data and a unique bathymetry dataset covering 200 years from the Ems‐Dollard estuary (Netherlands/Germany) were used to demonstrate how local resistant layers force the position and dimensions of confluences and bars on the scale of an entire estuary. These layers limit channel depth and consequently cause widening, resulting in mid‐channel bar formation and increased channel curvature. This could lead to unexpected estuary widening and may cause land loss in densely populated areas. With increasing channel volume (as may happen again under future sea‐level rise), resistant layers in the estuary's substrate become more exposed, which enhances their effects. Many systems around the world contain shallow resistant layers that potentially constrain estuary channel dimensions and steer bank erosion. This highlights that resistant layer effects are important to consider as part of mixed depositional processes in coastal environments. It is therefore necessary to globally account for the effects of inherited resistant layers in the possible response of estuaries to sea‐level rise and increased tidal penetration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyse the literature on a particular aspect of immigrant integration in Western European welfare states: the extent to which this can be explained by conditions set by institutions, social rights and rights of residence. Our focus is on health care, old age insurance, housing and vocational training, and on the circumstances under which migrants have access to benefits from the general systems of social security. In particular, the assignment of a legal position by the rights of residence plays an essential role. The various legal groups have access to social benefits depending on their status of residence. The institutional frame-work of each welfare states is also relevant to the access that people have to social benefits. In the countries analysed, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, the individual security systems are organised according to different political concepts, each of them allowing immigrants access to their benefits to a different degree. On the whole, the degree and kind of governmental regulations seem to be crucially important for the integration of immigrants into the welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of scientists who reviewed papers submitted for "European Journal of Soil Science." Included in the list are A. Martínez-Cortizas of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, K. Butterbach-Bahl of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany and G. B. M. Heuvelink of Wageningen, The Netherlands.

The study of flood management has experienced a paradigmatic shift over the past two decades. Particularly notable are the embracement of flood risk management (FRM) and comparative analysis of flood risk governance (FRG), meaning the complex institutional arrangements that shape the behavior of state and societal actors concerning FRM. Thousands of publications have addressed these themes, and this field of study is ripe for a systematic analysis that consolidates and structures this rapidly evolving literature. This study employed a bibliometric methodology to analyze the metadata (including authorship, keywords, abstracts, and citations) of 3059 such publications. The results reveal that both FRM and FRG scholarship have expanded over the past two decades; the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are the most prominent countries of origin, a small number of prolific authors stands out as major contributors, and a relatively small number of journals dominate as publication venues. The text mining results reveal that the bodies of FRM and FRG scholarship are highly correlated but yet differ in core subject matter, as demonstrated by the unique keywords found in the analysis. The findings are useful for researchers seeking relevant clusters for study and therefore offers reference value for future research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental disasters, and especially floods, are among today's biggest sustainability challenges. The number and intensity of floods are increasing, challenging current governance approaches. Governments worldwide are looking to diversify their flood risk management and adaptation strategies, among others, by increasing resident involvement in flood risk governance. Such involvement of individuals shifts responsibilities from public to private actors. A clear understanding of the extent and implications of this shift is difficult to reach as theoretical perspectives on the concept of responsibility vary. Similarly, grounds for attributing responsibility for flood preparedness and response differ across countries. This lack of analytical and empirical clarity complicates academic and policy discourses on what it actually means to 'be responsible'. The current article systematises these different approaches to responsibility in flood risk governance. To improve current knowledge on residents' responsibilities in flood risk governance, we present a conceptual framework that distinguishes among four theoretical notions of responsibility: legal responsibility, accountability, perceived responsibility, and moral responsibility. These notions are elucidated with the help of examples of flood risk governance practices in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands. We find that the four notions are closely intertwined. In addition, this article documents divergences between what individuals perceive as their own responsibility in flood risk management and the responsibilities that governments assume. We conclude with a discussion on the tensions between perceived responsibilities and the other three notions. Explicit, transparent and open discussion on these tensions is needed to allow attribution of responsibility in flood risk governance and to reconsider residents' roles in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many researchers and practitioners consider ethnic segregation in neighbourhoods or schools detrimental to migrants' acculturation in host societies. Empirically, however, segregation is a 'mixed bag' and its effects depend crucially on the investigated acculturation domain (e.g., negative for language skills, positive for well‐being). As most prior studies have focused on a restricted spectrum of acculturation, a comprehensive assessment within one single study is needed to establish comparability across different acculturation domains. Among over 8000 immigrant‐background students from four countries, we investigated the association of classroom segregation, defined as opportunities for contact with natives and other migrants, with a broad spectrum of acculturation (academic, attitude‐related, identity‐related, social, health‐related, and psychological criteria). Some findings were consistent (e.g., academic acculturation), some were contrary to prior research (e.g., social acculturation). In sum, our results shed light on the 'mixed bag' of segregation and contribute to the understanding of a crucial social issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This data set represents a comprehensive, dated phylogeny of a large European flora comprising the vascular plants of the British Isles, Germany, The Netherlands, and Switzerland, totaling 4685 species. The phylogeny thus encompasses all species in the trait databases BIOLFLOR, PLANTATT, and BioBase 2003. The topology of the phylogentic tree is based on a backbone family phylogeny of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group III. Subsequently, partial phylogenetic subtrees derived from a total of 518 recent molecular studies were manually pruned onto the backbone tree, using multi-gene consensus topologies if possible. Similarly, 1103 internal nodes and the root node were dated based on 261 recent studies. Finally, an ultrametric tree was calculated by placing undated nodes evenly between dated nodes. The phylogeny provides a reference data set for comparative analyses of trait correlations, trait evolution, trait based ecological processes, community assembly, or other phylogenetically informed analyses across a large taxon of European plant species. It can readily be used in phylogenetic analysis tools like ape, phytools, picante, or MESQUITE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on conferences related to materials engineering and structures in 2011 which include the International Conference on Advances in Communication and Information Technology - CIT 2011 to be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands on November 24-25 and the Second International Conference on Advances in Information and Communication Technologies - ICT 2011 in Hamburg, Germany on December 1-2.

This paper describes the discovery of the first open-air Upper Palaeolithic site to be found in Scotland, at Howburn, near Biggar in South Lanarkshire. An account is given of the composition and distribution of the lithic assemblage, which is discussed in terms of its British and north-west European context. Provisional parallels drawn are with the Late Hamburgian (Havelte) sites and assemblages of southern Scandinavia, northern Germany and the Netherlands. There is no absolute dating evidence for the site, but an age in the region of 12,000 C yr BP, towards the end of the earlier (Bølling) Lateglacial Interstadial stage, is proposed on the basis of the lithic artefacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a quantitative investigation into the occurrence of English in product advertisements in Dutch-speaking Belgium, French-speaking Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. For each country six issues of Elle in 2004 were collected and all ads of half a page or larger were analyzed, for a total of 2,384 different ads. More than two-thirds of those ads contained one or more English words. The actual occurrence of English was low, since 90 per cent of the ads with English were partly in English and partly in the local language, and only 13 per cent of the total amount of the text in those ads was in English. English was especially used for advertising products that can be associated with modernity. Our results regarding the amount of English used and the position of English in the ad do not completely corroborate those of other studies. This could indicate an increase in the use of English in product ads, but it could also be due to the fact that we applied a different research method than had been previously used. The countries we investigated differ considerably in the amount of English used. These differences shed new light on earlier theoretical studies that have compared European countries on the use and status of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the link between family-friendly policies and women's employment after birth of the first child in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Japan in the 1980s and the 1990s. Our econometric analyses use household panel data from each of the five countries: BHPS, GSOEP, OSA, HUS, and JPSC, respectively. Public policies that facilitate the combination of motherhood and paid employment offer an effective means in increasing the participation rate of first-time mothers. The results also indicate that the availability and stimulation of good-quality part-time employment can provide additional, strong incentives for new mothers to enter active employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The study investigates the relationship between perceived loneliness and the individuals' attitude whether voting is a civic duty. With that, it is the first study to shed light on the mechanism linking perceived loneliness to voting behavior. Methods: Two independent, cross‐sectional, and representative datasets from Germany (n = 1641) and the Netherlands (n = 1431) are analyzed. Results: The regression results and effect decomposition techniques show that loneliness is associated with reduced intention to vote as well as a lower sense of duty to vote. The effect of loneliness on voting behavior is partially mediated through a reduced sense of duty. Conclusion: Loneliness is associated with political disengagement. The study provides empirical evidence that the relationship between loneliness and turnout is partially mediated through sense of duty. This showcases that lonely individuals tend to feel detached from society and are less likely to feel obligated to participate in the electoral process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although international proclamations increasingly recognize legal sex beyond binary categories, domestic legislation is lagging behind. Germany and the Netherlands are the first countries in Western Europe where courts have ruled in favour of a third option. While the German constitution was amended to guarantee a third option, the Dutch government has refrained from implementing comparable legislation. What explains this difference? This article draws on parliamentary debates, newspapers and statements from activists to follow the trajectory of the third option. Building on literature on intersex rights legislation and the diffusion of LGBT rights norms, we find that an established progressive reputation can lead states like the Netherlands to take a back seat, while mobilization by activists was crucial in establishing the self‐determination of legal sex on the German political agenda. Our study contributes to unravelling the complex ways in which new norms shape – or fail to shape – domestic political outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social protection in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands share Bismarckian roots. Over time, these welfare states were however in constant flux and incorporated to a greater or lesser extend elements of both the Anglo‐Saxon and Nordic models. While the Netherlands has from the beginning deviated from the Bismarckian model, in recent years this welfare state has undergone important reforms that have made it increasingly evolve into a "Bismarck cum Beveridge" model. Germany and Belgium also witnessed a dual transformation, with retrenched earnings‐related benefits for long‐term unemployed and an increasing number of atypically employed people on the one hand and expanded social security to the so‐called "new social risks" on the other. It is against this changing institutional background that we can understand the similarities and differences in the extent to which these three continental welfare states used traditional social insurance systems to buffer the social and economic consequences of confinement. First, all three countries strengthened to varying degrees social protection systems for the active age population. So conceived, the policy responses were a response to the dual transformation of social protection that took place in recent decades without, however, changing its course. Second, the extent to which continental welfare states made use of existing social insurance schemes seems to be related to the extent to which these welfare states have moved in the Anglo‐Saxon direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates measurement errors in generally accepted figures on international transactions that are supplied by national statistical offices to the IMF and the OECD. Implicit minimal measurement errors in bilateral trade data for Germany and the Netherlands appear to he about 1.5-3 per cent. An investigation of foreign direct investment data for 20 OECD countries in the period 1950-89 shows that their accuracy has improved little if at all since the 1970s: in 15-25 per cent of the cases, implied minimal measurement errors are in excess of 10 per cent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the environmental and nutritional benefits of insects, their consumption would be one of the solutions to feed the growing human population. Despite the increasing interest in the use of insects as food and feed, consumer acceptance is the major obstacle to successful implementation in Western countries and we studied the factors that influence consumer acceptance in a group of university students from Germany and the Netherlands. In this exploratory research, a survey was conducted (n = 222). Socio‐demographic and psychological factors were established from a theoretical review. In addition, we elaborated on questions regarding information on the health and environmental benefits of consuming insects. Initially, the data obtained are presented through descriptive statistics. The influence of the socio‐demographic and psychological factors, and the information on the willingness to accept insects as animal feed and human food was analyzed using correlations and multiple linear regressions. Results showed more willingness to accept insects as animal feed than in human food. The acceptance among German and Dutch students seems to be driven by issues similar to those in other European countries, such as visual aspects and knowledge about the benefits. The effect of the information on willingness constitutes an important finding of this study, especially for the use of insects in animal feed, since most of the previous studies have focused on the use of insects as human food. Our data support the need to inform and educate consumers about the environmental and health benefits of entomophagy. We conclude that effective efforts to implement entomophagy could increase the level of familiarity with the insect food and inform (or educate) consumers about its benefits. Insights from this study are useful to address studies focusing on specific segments of possible early adopters and consequently addressing communication strategies in this market segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employee coverage by multi‐employer bargaining declined since the 1980s in many countries, but countries differ in the extent of that decline. These differences are due, in part, to statutory coverage extension. We analyse the use of statutory coverage extension in two countries, Germany and the Netherlands. Agreements are extended frequently in the Netherlands, where coverage remained stable as a result, but sparingly in Germany, where coverage eroded. The article shows that different employer attitudes are the main cause of this difference. These differences in employer attitudes result from (a) different perceptions of the effects of wage competition by non‐organized firms on organized firms and (b) differences in employer views on the appropriateness of state compulsion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study illustrates the huge untapped potential of quantifying the impact of culture in making meaningful comparisons across groups. Our focus is on cross‐national differences in nurses' reports of their relations with physicians, and how the measurement of this complex construct and the evaluation of true differences are related to dimensions of national culture. Design: We examine across 14 European countries the association between indices of national culture from the seminal work of Hofstede and 39,435 nurses' ratings of their relations with physicians. Multilevel confirmatory factor analysis was used to evaluate strong factorial invariance across countries and to examine the influence of power distance and masculinity. Findings: There was wide variation across countries in nurses' reports of their relations with physicians. Strong factorial invariance was shown for a one‐factor model, which confirmed that across countries the seven survey items measure a common factor of physician‐nurse relations. This model showed no country bias for any of the seven survey items, which suggests that differences across countries reflect true differences. These true differences were significantly associated with variation in country values of power distance, which showed a significant negative correlation with physician–nurse relations. Conclusions: Continuously pursuing a better understanding of characteristics that impact the studied indicators, such as national culture, is elementary to better understand the construct under study. In this application, country values of power distance negatively impacted nurse‐reported relations with physicians, which strongly varied across countries. Clinical Relevance: Better nurse‐reported relations between nurses and physicians link to higher nurse job satisfaction, lower emotional exhaustion, better nurse‐perceived quality of care, and lower patient mortality. The Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index is an excellent instrument to characterize variation in working relations between nurses and physicians as well as physicians' professional posture towards nurses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article estimates the effect of the Dutch–German border on house prices. We argue that the difference between house prices at the border indicates the willingness to pay to stay in a country compared to living across the border. After a change in the tax rules in 2001, migration from the Netherlands to Germany increased substantially and the gradient of Dutch house price towards the German border steepened. Combining a German and Dutch real estate dataset and using different estimation strategies, we find that asking prices of comparable housing drop by about 16% when one crosses the Dutch–German border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The use of large‐eddy simulation at a resolution insufficient to resolve the largest turbulent eddies frequently suffers from an overestimation of vertical mixing in the nocturnal boundary layer. The resulting biases in the mean thermodynamic structure—typically an overestimation of the near‐surface temperature, and underestimation of the boundary layer top temperature—could potentially influence the formation of low clouds or fog. Whether this is likely to happen is assessed using both observations, and a newly developed conceptual model. First, observations from Northwestern Europe (Germany and Netherlands) are used to characterize the humidity conditions at night. The results indicate that saturation most likely occurs at the surface, but that the conditions at 200 m height are also often close to saturation. Second, the conceptual model is used to study whether overestimating vertical mixing, and the resulting negative temperature biases at the boundary layer top, could result in a spurious formation of low clouds in large‐eddy simulations. The results convincingly indicate that this is unlikely to happen, as overestimating vertical mixing decreases the relative humidity throughout the nocturnal boundary layer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Following crises and fiascos, a framing contest takes place in which actors have to account for their actions and might get blamed for what went wrong. An inadequate response to blame can lead to resignation or losing a re-election. Currently, the literature on blame games focuses mainly on the policy, agency, and - especially - presentational strategies one can use to respond to blame. Based on our analysis of the blame games following two festival disasters in Germany and the Netherlands, we show that our current understanding of blame games and blame responses needs to be broadened to include context, rituals, and sub-blame games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The availability of costly safety measures against transfusion-transmissible infections forces Western countries to confront difficult ethical questions. How to decide about implementing such measures? When are such decisions justified? As a preliminary to addressing these questions, we assessed which concerns shape actual donor blood safety policymaking in five Western countries.Study Design and Methods: Our qualitative study involved determining which issues had been discussed in advisory committee meetings and capturing these issues in general categories. Appropriate documents were identified in collaboration with local decision-making experts in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The introduction of hepatitis B virus nucleic acid testing and selected measures against variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, West Nile virus, and Q-fever were chosen as cases representing decision-making on safety measures with high costs and low or uncertain added safety.Results: A broad inventory of concerns was established, including: 1) nine categories of advantages and disadvantages of candidate safety policies; 2) six kinds of difficulties in assessing risks and forecasting the effects of safety policies; 3) 13 decision-making principles; and 4) six kinds of practical barriers hampering the translation of candidate policies into decisions.Conclusion: Blood safety policymaking involves a wide variety of competing concerns, and approaches to reconcile these considerations are themselves contested. Developing a systematic decision-making approach requires ethical reflection on, among others, reasonable costs of safety and the value of transparency in public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issues of 'policy diffusion' or 'policy transfer' and 'mutual learning' have become important topics in comparative research on social policy and health systems. In current debates on explaining reform in ' Bismarckian' social (health) insurance systems, however, these issues have been neglected. In particular, the role of 'negative lesson-drawing' in the sense of avoiding mistakes of others has not often been considered. This article compares health system change in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, three countries with health systems of the social insurance type. In contrast to the existing literature, our analysis stresses that these countries have taken different reform paths since the 1990s. By applying a most similar systems design, we analyze how far cross-border lesson-drawing has contributed to health system divergence in the three countries. The empirical basis of the analysis is semi-structured qualitative expert interviews, a method appropriate for tracing processes of lesson-drawing. We argue that in order to fully understand the diverging reform trajectories, we need to take into account how political decision-makers refer to (negative) experiences of other countries. Generally, national driving forces for health system change were at the heart of many crucial reforms during the period studied. Nevertheless, we claim that it was the German bad practice role model that kept the reform paths of Austria and Germany apart in the Austrian health reform discussion between 2000 and 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the political mobilization of ethnic minorities has shown that dual ethno-national identification facilitates involvement in political action on behalf of the ethnic group. This study extends this research by proposing that a dual identity can impede political mobilization on behalf of another relevant in-group - the religious community - especially if this in-group is not accepted by the wider society. Using a sample of 641 Muslims of Turkish origin living in Germany and the Netherlands, dual ethno-national identity ( Turkish- German/ Turkish- Dutch) was examined in relation to religious Muslim identification and religious political mobilization. Dual identity was expected to be indirectly related to lower mobilization via decreased religious group identification. Further, this mediating process was predicted to be stronger for Turkish Muslims who perceived relatively high religious group discrimination. In both countries we found support for the mediating hypothesis, however, the moderating role of discrimination was confirmed only for the Netherlands. Turkish- Dutch identification was associated with lower support for religious political mobilization because of lower Muslim identification only for Turkish- Dutch participants who perceived high levels of discrimination. These findings indicate that a strong dual (ethno-national) identity can undermine minority members' support for political rights and actions on behalf of a third relevant in-group, and therefore qualify the social psychological benefits of the dual identity model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a sample of 602 Turkish Muslims from Germany and the Netherlands, we examined the influence of ingroup norms and perceived discrimination on religious group identification and host national identification. Participants experiencing pressures from their ingroup to maintain an ethnoreligious lifestyle as well as those who perceived discrimination by natives identified more strongly with their religious group and, in turn, identified less with the host country. Further, the positive relationship between discrimination and religious group identification and the negative relationship between religious and national identification were especially strong for participants who perceived incompatibility between Western and Islamic ways of life. It is concluded that Muslim and host national identities are not always mutually exclusive and that it is important to study the conditions that reconcile and contrast them. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. In the studies of acceleration conducted so far a multidimensional perspective has largely been neglected. No attempt has been made to relate social-emotional characteristics of accelerated versus non-accelerated students in perspective of environmental factors. Aims. In this study, social-emotional characteristics of accelerated gifted students in the Netherlands were examined in relation to personal and environmental factors. Samples. Self-concept and social contacts of accelerated ( n = 148) and non-accelerated ( n = 55) gifted students, aged 4 to 27 ( M = 11.22, SD = 4.27) were measured. Method. Self-concept and social contacts of accelerated and non-accelerated gifted students were measured using a questionnaire and a diary, and parents of these students evaluated their behavioural characteristics. Gender and birth order were studied as personal factors and grade, classroom, teachers' gender, teaching experience, and the quality of parent-school contact as environmental factors. Results. The results showed minimal differences in the social-emotional characteristics of accelerated and non-accelerated gifted students. The few differences we found favoured the accelerated students. We also found that multiple grade skipping does not have negative effects on social-emotional characteristics, and that long-term effects of acceleration tend to be positive. As regards the possible modulation of personal and environmental factors, we merely found an impact of such factors in the non-accelerated group. Conclusions. The results of this study strongly suggest that social-emotional characteristics of accelerated gifted students and non-accelerated gifted students are largely similar. These results thus do not support worries expressed by teachers about the acceleration of gifted students. Our findings parallel the outcomes of earlier studies in the United States and Germany in that we observed that acceleration does not harm gifted students, not even in the case of multiple grade skipping. On the contrary, there is a suggestion in the data that accelerated students are more socially competent than non-accelerated students. The findings in this study can reassure those parents and teachers who worry about the social-emotional consequences of acceleration in school: If a student is gifted, acceleration seems to be a sound and, in many cases, appropriate measure in gifted education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resumen Hace ya varios años que los sistemas de seguro de enfermedad de Alemania, Francia y Países Bajos se esfuerzan por frenar sus gastos y diversificar sus recursos, inicialmente compuestos en su mayor parte por cotizaciones sociales. La diversificación se lleva a cabo mediante una ampliación de la gama de financiamientos públicos y un mayor recurso a soluciones y operadores privados. En Alemania y Países Bajos las reformas denotan la voluntad de crear una situación de competencia entre aseguradores. En Francia el seguro complementario privado se ha vuelto indispensable para disponer de un acceso abierto a la atención médica completa. Sin embargo, pese a los dispositivos correctivos de asistencia, las medidas adoptadas se repercuten en la redistribución. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Auszug Seit mehreren Jahren bemühen sich die Krankenversicherungssysteme in Deutschland, Frankreich und den Niederlanden, ihre Ausgaben zu drosseln und ihre Einnahmequellen, ursprünglich vor allem Sozialabgaben, zu diversifizieren. Diese Diversifizierung kann in einer erweiterten Finanzierung aus öffentlicher Hand bestehen oder auch, indem stärker auf private Ressourcen oder Anbieter zurückgegriffen wird. In Deutschland und den Niederlanden gehen die Reformen mit der Entwicklung einer Konkurrenzsituation zwischen den Versicherern einher. In Frankreich sind private Zusatzversicherungen unverzichtbar geworden, um eine ausreichende medizinische Versorgung zu gewährleisten. Diese unterschiedlichen Maßnahmen haben außerdem Konsequenzen auf die Umverteilung, gegen die mit sozialen Hilfsmaßnahmen kaum anzukommen ist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governance in higher education has undergone certain substantial shifts in recent decades. In order to analyse this process from an empirical point of view, a specific understanding of governance, based on the role of the public power in question (state, government or another such power, depending on the context) has been assumed. Changes in systemic governance (and consequently also at the institutional level) are a product in particular of governments' responses to changes in their respective environments. This theoretical assumption, which in this particular study takes the form of a specific typology of governance modes, is employed to analyse those changes witnessed in higher education over the last 20 years. It does this by focusing on four specific national cases (England, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands). The empirical evidence shows that government continues to govern, and has not lost any of its policy-making power, but has simply changed the way it steers higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If ever there was momentum to roll back the welfare state, it is the (aftermath) of the financial crisis of 2008-09. All theoretical perspectives within comparative welfare state research predict radical reform in this circumstance, but does it also happen? Our data indicate that - at least so far - it does not. Focusing on a selection of advanced welfare states (the UK, the USA, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden), we find that these countries face similar problems and that their initial response to these problems is also similar. The latter is surprising because, theoretically, we would expect varying responses across welfare state regime types. Rather than retrenchment, we observe a first phase of emergency capital injections in the banking sector and a second of Keynesian demand management and labour market protection, including the (temporary) expansion of social programmes. Continuing public support for the welfare state was a main precondition for this lack of immediate radical retrenchment. However, the contours of a third phase have become apparent now that budgetary constraints are forcing political actors to make tough choices and introduce austerity policies. As a result, the question of who pays what, when, and how will likely give rise to increasingly sharp distributional conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]