Trends and gaps in the academic literature on EU labour migration policies. CEPS Paper in Liberty and Security No. 50/December 2012

This paper provides an overview of the ‘state of the art’ in the academic literature on EU labour migration policies. It forms part of the research agenda of Work Package 18 of the NEUJOBS project, which aims at reviewing legislation and practices regarding the labour market inclusion and protection of rights of different categories of foreign workers in European labour markets. Accordingly, particular attention is paid to the works of scholars who evaluate the status of rights of third-country national workers in relation to labour market access, employment security, social integration, etc., in European legislation on labour immigration. More specifically, the review has selected those scholarly works that focus specifically on analysing the manner in which policy-makers have addressed the granting of rights to non-EU migrant workers, and the manner in which policy agendas – through the relevant political and institutional dynamics – have found their translation in the legislation adopted. This paper consists of two core parts. In the first section, it reviews the works of scholars who have touched on these research questions with respect to the internal dimensions of EU labour migration policies. The second section does the same for the external dimensions of these policies. Both sections start off by analysing the main trends in the literature that reviews these questions for the internal and external dimensions of European migration policies as a whole, and then move on to how these ‘trends’ can (or cannot) be found translated in scholarly writings on labour migration policies more specifically. In the final section, the paper concludes by summarising the main trends and gaps in the literature reviewed, and indicates avenues for further research.

The Criminalisation of Migration in Europe: A State-of-the-Art of the Academic Literature and Research. CEPS Liberty and Security in Europe No. 61, October 2013

In the last 30 years, a clear trend has come to define modern immigration law and policy. A set of seemingly disparate developments concerning the constant reinforcement of border controls, tightening of conditions of entry, expanding capacities for detention and deportation and the proliferation of criminal sanctions for migration offences, accompanied by an anxiety on the part of the press, public and political establishment regarding migrant criminality can now be seen to form a definitive shift in the European Union towards the so-called ‘criminalisation of migration’. This paper aims to provide an overview of the ‘state-of-the-art’ in the academic literature and EU research on criminalisation of migration in Europe. It analyses three key manifestations of the so-called ‘crimmigration’ trend: discursive criminalisation; the use of criminal law for migration management; and immigrant detention, focusing both on developments in domestic legislation of EU member states but also the increasing conflation of mobility, crime and security which has accompanied EU integration. By identifying the trends, synergies and gaps in the scholarly approaches dealing with the criminalisation of migration, the paper seeks to provide a framework for on-going research under Work Package 8 of the FIDUCIA project.

An Academic Medical Center's Expansion to the European Union: A Case Study of UPMC's Joint Projects in Italy and Ireland. Pittsburgh Papers on the European Union Vol. 3, June 2014

This case study examines the expansion of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) to Italy and Ireland in the European Union. The authors use international business theory to help understand why US Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) are beginning to go abroad and, through semistructured interviews with UPMC officials, they examine the market entry issues UPMC faced when expanding to Italy and Ireland. The authors also explain why UPMC’s first successful foreign ventures took place in the European Union. They conclude with comments on several of the strategic issues that AMCs should address if they wish to successfully expand overseas.

European Policy Uses of International Comparisons of Academic Achievement. ACES Working Papers, 2012

International large-scale assessments (ILSAs) and the resulting ranking of countries in key academic subjects have become increasingly significant in the development of global performance indicators and national level reforms in education. As one of the largest international surveys, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has had a considerable impact on the world of international comparisons of education. Based on the results of these assessments, claims are often made about the relative success or failure of education systems, and in some cases, such as Germany or Japan, ILSAs have sparked national level reforms (Ertl, 2006; Takayama, 2007, 2009). In this paper, I offer an analysis of how PISA is increasingly used as a key reference both for a regional2 entity like the European Union (EU) and for national level performance targets in the example of Spain (Breakspear, 2012). Specifically, the paper examines the growth of OECD and EU initiatives in defining quality education, and the use of both EU benchmarks and PISA in defining the education indicators used in Spain to measure and set goals for developing quality education. By doing so, this paper points to the role of the OECD and the EU in national education systems. It therefore adds to a body of literature pointing to the complex relationship between international, regional, and national education policy spaces (cf. Dale & Robertson, 2002; Lawn & Grek, 2012; Rizvi & Lingard, 2009).

Skill formation in Britain and Germany: Recent developments in the context of traditional differences. CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No.06.1, 2006

This paper proposes a comparison of skill formation in Germany and Britain over the last decades. Taking historical trends into account, the two cases can be regarded as representing different types of skill production regimes. Institu-tional features include a relatively low degree of standardization of training and a larger amount of on-the-job training in Britain. In Germany, post-compulsory training has been conducted predominantly within the dual system of vocational training, underlining the vocational specificity of a large part of the labor market. As a consequence, international differences in individual skill investments, transitions from school to work and other life-course patterns can be observed. At least in Britain, however, the situation seems to have changed considerably during the 1990s. The paper argues that the divergence in more recent developments can still be understood as an expression of historical path-dependency given the traditional connections between the post-compulsory training system and the broader societal context in which it is embedded. These concern, in particular, links with the system of general and academic education as the basis for – and also a possible competitor with – vocational training; links with the labor market as they are indicated by specific skill requirements and returns to qualifications; and, links with the order of social stratification in the form of the selective acquisition and the social consequences of these qualifications. The links manifest themselves as typical individual-level consequences and decisions. Founded on the basis of these distinctions, the aim of this paper is to investigate the preceding conditions for recent developments in the qualification systems of Britain and Germany, which have adapted to specific challenges during the last decades.

Measuring Dependency Ratios using National Transfer Accounts. CEPS Working Document No. 420/April 2016

It is now widely recognised that the socio-economic changes that ageing societies will bring about are poorly captured by the traditional demographic dependency ratios (DDRs), such as the old-age dependency ratio that relates the number of people aged 65+ to the working-age population. Future older generations will have increasingly better health and are likely to work longer. By combining population projections and National Transfer Accounts (NTA) data for seven European countries, we project the quantitative impact of ageing on public finances until 2040 and compare it to projected DDRs. We then simulate the public finance impact of changes in three key indicators related to the policy responses to population ageing: net immigration, healthy ageing and longer working lives. We do this by linking age-specific public health transfers and labour market participation rates to changes in mortality. Four main findings emerge: first, the simple old-age dependency ratio overestimates the future public finance challenges faced by the countries studied – significantly so for some countries, e.g. Austria, Finland and Hungary. Second, healthy ageing has a modest effect (on public finances) except in the case of Sweden, where it is substantial. Third, the long-run effect of immigration is well captured by the simple DDR measure if immigrants are similar to the native population. Finally, increasing the length of working lives is central to addressing the public finance challenge of ageing. Extending the length of working lives by three to four years over the next 25 years – equivalent to the increase in life expectancy – severely limits the impact of ageing on public transfers.