Collateral and Credit Rationing. The role of collateral in explaining and remediating the limited flow of credit to households and SMEs. ECRI Policy Brief No. 7, February 2014

European-wide data concerning both companies and households indicate that the credit rationing phenomenon, which has been predicted by theory, does in fact occur to a significant degree in the European credit market. Among SMEs, micro companies are most vulnerable and the current economic crisis has only made these concerns more pressing. Top-down use of the monetary transmission mechanism alone is insufficient to counter the problem. The other solution consists of a bottom-up, microeconomic stimulation of lending transactions, by focusing on collateral and guarantees. The data confirm the high importance that lenders – especially individual households and micro companies – attach to collateral and guarantees when making their lending decisions. As a consequence, we would argue that those parts of the law governing security interests and guarantees should be one of the primary targets for government policy aimed at improving credit flows, especially in avoiding a conflict between consumer protection measures and laws on surety and guarantees. This policy brief firstly aims to give an overview of the problem of credit rationing and to show that low-income households and SMEs are most concerned by the phenomenon. Focusing solely on loans as a way of financing and on the issues related to access to finance by micro and small companies as well households, it then sketches possible solutions focused on guarantees. This paper brings together data from the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption survey (HFCS), Eurostat, and both the latest wave of the extended biennial EC/ECB Survey on the access to finance of SMEs (EC/ECB SAFE 2013) and the latest wave of the smaller semi-annual ECB SAFE Survey, covering the period between October 2012 and March 2013.

Simulation of Land Use and Investment Behaviour under Different Policy Scenarios: Results of the extended farm/household model. Factor Markets Working Paper No. 27, July 2012

Factor markets are a central issue in analyses of farm development and of agricultural sector vitality. Among the different production factors, land is one of the most studied. Several studies seek to estimate the effect of government policy payments on land value or land rental prices. The studies mostly agree that government payments and other types of policy support are significant in explaining land prices and account for a large share of them. In October 2011, the European Commission published a new policy proposal for the common agricultural policy (CAP) up to 2020. The proposed regulation includes a shift from historical to regional payments. The objective of this paper is to provide an ex ante analysis of the impact of the new CAP policy instruments on the land market. In particular, the effect of the regionalisation of payments in Italy is examined. The analysis is based on the use of a mathematical programming model to simulate the changes in land demand for a farm in Emilia Romagna. The results highlight the relevance of the new policy mechanism in determining a change in land demand. Yet the effect is highly dependent on initial ownership of entitlements under the historical payment scheme.

Die EU-Volksabstimmungen in Österreich, Finnland, Schweden und Norwegen. Verlauf, Ergebnisse Motive und Folgen = The EU referendums in Austria, Finland, Sweden and Norway. Results, motives and consequences. Institute for Advanced Studies Political Science Series No. 23, 1995

This paper analysis the 1994 EU referenda in Austria, Finland, Sweden and Norway in a comparative perspective. It shows that the results were, to some extent at least, related to how pronounced the respective elite consensus was on the necessity or desirability of EU membership. It also shows that in all cases the main motivation of the Yes voters was economic. The paper goes on to analyse the regional and social variations in voting patterns. In the concluding chapter some of the medium- and longterm effects of the referenda debates and results on Austrian, Finnish and Swedish government policy within the EU are outlined.

Big business in Belarus - its genesis, conditions and prospects. OSW Commentary No. 113, 2013-09-09

Over the past ten to twenty years, Belarus has seen a steep rise in the number of local dollar millionaires. This has somewhat undermined the myth of an egalitarian model of society promoted through the Belarusian state propaganda. There is a small group of businessmen among the top earners who, in exchange for their political loyalty and their consent to share profits with those in power, have enjoyed a number of privileges that allow them to safely conduct business in an environment typically hostile to private enterprise. The favourable conditions under which they are operating have enabled them not only to accumulate substantial capital, but also to invest it abroad. However, since such businesses are seen as providing a financial safety net for the regime, in 2011 and 2012 some of their directors received an EU travel ban, while their companies were subjected to economic sanctions by Brussels. At the same time, fearing that Belarus’s big business could become powerful enough to influence the country’s political scene (as has been the case in Russia and Ukraine), Alexander Lukashenka has actively prevented such players from becoming too independent. Consequently, Belarus has so far not developed its own elite class of oligarchs who would be able to actively influence government policy. The current informal agreement between the government in Minsk and big business has proved stable and is unlikely to change in the near future. Nonetheless, a reordering of state power giving Belarus’s big business significant political influence would be possible should Mr Lukashenka lose power in the next presidential election.