Flexible labour markets, workers' protection and the security of the wings": a Danish flexicurity solution to the unemployment and social problems in globalized economies"

Includes bibliography

Committed to reform? Pragmatic antitrust enforcement in electricity markets

This thesis is a collection of essays about the instrumental use of commitment decisions to facilitate the completion of the European internal electricity market. European policy can shape markets in many ways, two most evident being regulation and competition enforcement. The interplay between these two instruments attracts a lot of scholarly attention. One of the major concerns in the competition vs. regulation debate is the instrumental use of competition rules. It has been observed that competition enforcement is triggered not only as a response to an anticompetitive harm occurring in the market, but that it sometimes becomes a powerful tool in the European Commission’s hands to pursue regulatory goals. This thesis looks for examples of such instrumentalisation in the context of electricity markets and finds that the Commission is very pragmatic in using all the possible instruments it has at hand to push forward its project of creating the internal electricity market. This includes regulation, competition enforcement and all sorts of political pressure. To the extent that commitment decisions accelerate sector-specific regulation and overcome political deadlocks, they contribute to the Commission’s energy policy goals. However, instrumentalisation of competition rules comes at a certain cost to competition policy, energy policy and, most importantly, to electricity markets themselves. Markets might be negatively affected either indirectly, by application of sector-specific regulation or competition policy building on previous commitment decisions, or directly, through the implementation of inadequate commitments in individual cases. Concluding, commitment decisions generally contributed to achieving the policy objectives of the internal electricity market, but their use for that purpose does not come without cost. Given that this cost is ultimately borne by the internal electricity market, the Commission should take a more balanced approach to the instrumental use of commitment decisions so that it does not do more harm than good.

The market manipulation regime in the European Union

Market manipulation is an illegal practice that enables a person can profit from practices that artificially raise or lower the prices of an instrument in the financial markets. Its prohibition is based on the 2003 Market Abuse Directive in the EU. The current market manipulation regime was broadly considered as a big success except for enforcement and supervisory inconsistencies in the Member States at the initial. A review of the market manipulation regime began at the end of 2007, which became quickly incorporated into the wider EU crisis-era reform program. A number of weaknesses of current regime have been identified, which include regulatory gaps caused by the development of trading venues and financial products, regulatory gaps concerning cross-border and cross-markets manipulation (particular commodity markets), legal uncertainty as a result of various implementation, and inefficient supervision and enforcement. On 12 June 2014, a new regulatory package of market abuse, Market Abuse Regulation and Directive on criminal sanctions for market abuse, has been adopted. And several changes will be made concerning the EU market manipulation regime. A wider scope of the regime and a new prohibition of attempted market manipulation will ensure the prevention of market manipulation at large. The AMPs will be subject to strict scrutiny of ESMA to reduce divergences in implementation. In order to enhance efficiency of supervision and enforcement, powers of national competent authorities will be strengthened, ESMA is imposed more power to settle disagreement between national regulators, and the administrative and criminal sanctioning regimes are both further harmonized. In addition, the protection of fundamental rights is stressed by the new market manipulation regime, and some measures are provided to guarantee its realization. Further, the success EU market manipulation regime could be of significant reference to China, helping China to refine its immature regime.

IS THE U.S. SHALE GAS BOOM HAVING AN EFFECT ON THE EUROPEAN GAS MARKET?

This thesis focuses on the impact of the American shale gas boom on the European natural gas market. The study presents different tests in order to analyze the dynamics of natural gas prices in the U.S., U.K. and German natural gas market. The question of cointegration between these different markets are analyzed using several tests. More specifically, the ADF tests for the presence of a unit root. The error correction model test and the Johansen cointegration procedure are applied in order to accept or reject the hypothesis of an integrated market. The results suggest no evidence of cointegration between these markets. There currently is no evidence of an impact of the U.S. shale gas boom on the European market.

Consumer Behavior in Moral Markets. On the Relevance of Identity, Justice Beliefs, Social Norms, Status and Trust in Ethical Consumption

This article addresses ethical consumer behavior and uses the purchase of Fair Trade (FT) coffee to gain insights into determinants of ‘moral behavior’ in the marketplace. Our primary concern is to clarify which theoretical concepts and determinants are more useful than others in explaining FT consumption. We compare the explanatory power of consumer budget restrictions, consumer identity, social and personal norms, social status, justice beliefs, and trust. Our second aim is methodological; we contrast data on self-reported consumption of FT coffee with experimental data on hypothetical choices of different coffee products. To gain insights into the robustness of our measurement and findings, we test our propositions using two samples of undergraduate students from Germany and the United States. Our data show that consumer identity and personal norms are the major determinants of FT consumption in both samples, the results from survey-based data and from our experimental data are similar in this regard. Further, we demonstrate that studies based on a limited number of determinants might overestimate effects; the effect of justice beliefs for instance vanishes if other determinants are taken into account.

European Community Communications Law : An Introduction

The present article is an abridged version of a chapter to the book EC Electronic Communications and Competition Law (London: Cameron May, 2007). It provides an introduction to the rules at the European Community level governing the electronic communications sector (previously and more traditionally referred to as telecommunications). Such an introduction encompasses essentially an enquiry into the relevant competition law rules, of which here particular attention is paid to abuse of dominant position and the essential facilities doctrine, as well as an analysis of the EC sector specific regulatory framework, which has substantially evolved since the liberalisation of the telecommunications sector back in the beginning of the 1990s. It is the objective of the article to explore to what extent both regulatory tools could deal with the specificities of communications markets, and where they may fail to do so.

The diversity of activation markets in Europe

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to analyse the diversity of markets for the provision of activation services. Design/methodology/approach – The article is based on the outcomes of a project involving nine European countries. The project investigated changing forms of governance of income protection schemes and activation services for unemployed people. Diversity is investigated by focusing on five dimensions of diversity derived from the quasi‐market concept as developed by Le Grand: the purchasers, the providers, the customers, the purchaser‐provider split and the purchaser‐customer split. Findings – The paper finds considerable diversity in the design of markets for the provision of activation. Diversity is visible in all dimensions involved in the analysis. One interesting finding is that a full split between purchasers and providers hardly exists, although some countries have introduced a stricter split than others. Another finding concerns the voice and choice of service consumers, which seems hardly affected by the introduction of market mechanisms in the provision of activation. Finally, marketisation does not seem to be an irreversible project, as de‐marketisation processes were identified as well. Originality/value – Most current research into activation markets and their effects pays little attention to the issue of diversity in the design and functioning of markets. This article argues in favour of more systematic research of market diversity and of the variety of effects of various market models. Rather than comparing marketised with public service provision, a stronger focus on various market models may strengthen our insight into how service provision models affect the effectiveness of activation services.

Same same but different: Locational policies in small and medium-sized European cities

Globalized interurban competition is affecting cities of various sizes and locations. Small and medium-sized cities have to find ways to position themselves in global markets by formulating locational policies. This paper outlines an analytical framework of locational policies that cities adopt in order to increase their competitiveness. By comparing two European small and mediumsized cities (Lucerne and Ulm), we examine manifestations of locational policies and compare if these policies are being diverse or resemble each other. We found that strategies of both cities are sharing the intentions to be competitive, but their policy choices differ because the economic and political context is enabling or restricting certain kinds of locational policies. Furthermore, the findings point to the high explanatory power of municipal tax autonomy when studying locational policies.

Economic impacts of climate change on agrifood markets: A bio-economic approach with a focus on the EU

Projections for world food production and prices play a crucial role to evaluate and tackle future food security challenges. Understanding how these projections will be affected by climate change is the main objective of this study. By means of a bio-economic approach we assess the economic impacts of climate change on agrifood markets, providing both a global analysis and a regionalised evaluation within the EU. To account for uncertainty, we analyse the IPCC emission scenario A1B for the 2030 horizon under several simulation scenarios that differ in (1) the climate projection, from HadleyCM3 (warm) or ECHAM5 (mild) global circulation models; and (2) the influence of CO2 effects. Results of this study indicate that agrifood market projections to 2030 are very sensitive to climate change uncertainties and, in particular to the magnitude of the carbon fertilization effect.

An evolutive approach for the delineation of local labour markets

This paper presents a new approach to the delineation of local labour markets based on evolutionary computation. The main objective is the regionalisation of a given territory into functional regions based on commuting flows. According to the relevant literature, such regions are defined so that (a) their boundaries are rarely crossed in daily journeys to work, and (b) a high degree of intra-area movement exists. This proposal merges municipalities into functional regions by maximizing a fitness function that measures aggregate intra-region interaction under constraints of inter-region separation and minimum size. Real results are presented based on the latest database from the Census of Population in the Region of Valencia. Comparison between the results obtained through the official method which currently is most widely used (that of British Travel-to-Work Areas) and those from our approach is also presented, showing important improvements in terms of both the number of different market areas identified that meet the statistical criteria and the degree of aggregate intra-market interaction.

A memetic algorithm for the delineation of local labour markets

Given a territory composed of basic geographical units, the delineation of local labour market areas (LLMAs) can be seen as a problem in which those units are grouped subject to multiple constraints. In previous research, standard genetic algorithms were not able to find valid solutions, and a specific evolutionary algorithm was developed. The inclusion of multiple ad hoc operators allowed the algorithm to find better solutions than those of a widely-used greedy method. However, the percentage of invalid solutions was still very high. In this paper we improve that evolutionary algorithm through the inclusion of (i) a reparation process, that allows every invalid individual to fulfil the constraints and contribute to the evolution, and (ii) a hillclimbing optimisation procedure for each generated individual by means of an appropriate reassignment of some of its constituent units. We compare the results of both techniques against the previous results and a greedy method.