Labour Migration and Competitiveness in the European Union

The study is about the characteristics and phenomena of the labour migration that fluxes from, through, and into the East Central European region. The typical groups of migrant workers are emphasized, like the qualified employees, the commuters, the illegal workers, or the migrants according to the family's income optimization. The brain drain is analyzed as a problem of the absence of experts in the region. The tools and possibilities of migration policy are discussed, too, to find suggestions for the state how to turn the direction of migration to the desired way. Through this topic, the countries of destination are introduced with the competitive position of the eastern migrants. The study also reflects on the problem of asymmetric flux of labour out of the region.     

Migration and Policies in the European Union: Highly Skilled Mobility,Free Movement of Labour and Recognition of Diplomas

This article evaluates the relationship between highly skilled mobility (especially by individuals with university‐level degrees) and migration policies. Data from the European Union (EU) and Portugal (in particular) provide the empirical basis of the research. EU policies regarding the free circulation of individuals which aim to build the “common market” for economic factors (including labour) are reviewed, as are the more specific recognition of diplomas policies for professional and academic purposes, and recent levels of international mobility in both the EU and Portugal. The article also enumerates the main obstacles that, from a political and legal or social and cultural perspective, explain the low mobility revealed by those figures. Obstacles include the broad denial of citizenship rights; the necessity of assuring a means of sustenance; linguistic and technical exigencies for diploma recognition; the social attributes of work (more explicit in the service sector); and the institutional nature of national skilled labour markets. The main exception to the low mobility rule – movements of cadres in the internal labour markets of transnational corporations – together with flows in other multinational organizations, are also reviewed. In these, migrations are relatively exempt from political constraints and, significantly, avoid the recognition procedures adopted by the EU. In other words, it seems that the entry of highly skilled individuals in a transnational corporation, and not their citizenship in a Europe without frontiers, is what enables them to achieve effective mobility.     

Union security and the right to work: A comprehensive bibliography

From scholarly treatises to ideological polemics, more has been written in the past 50 years about union security and the right to work than almost any issue in labor law. It has been a profitable source of study for academics in several disciplines, and practitioners from both sides of the labor bar have contributed generously to the literature. For persons doing current work in the field, this vast accumulation of research and analysis provides an invaluable point of departure. Unfortunately, these materials are often somewhat difficult to find. Combing the traditional indices of legal and periodic literature is a time-consuming task, and a specialized bibliography has heretofore been lacking. Hopefully, this will supply the need. Notwithstanding my best efforts at thoroughness in compiling this bibliography, I will admit that I use the term “comprehensive” with great trepidation, for it is in the nature of things that persons who make such claims are soon taught their folly. Given the scope and popularity of the topic, it is inevitable that I overlooked some worthy books and articles. The bibliography is divided into broad and sometimes overlapping categories, and where a book or article was placed was often a close decision. Within each category, the materials are listed in chronological order.     

Fiscal equalisation: Principles and an application to the European Union

The paper derives a normative model for partial fiscal equalisation based on a number of axioms and makes special allowance for the existence of a specific fiscal need in the jurisdictions. A simple version of this idealised equalisation scheme relates net contributions to the equalisation funds to deviations of a jurisdictions gross income from average gross income and a jurisdictions specific needs from average specific needs. The theoretical model is then empirically tested for the case of the European Union using data from 1986–97. It is found that most restrictions of the model appear to hold, in particular, relatively richer countries contribute more and those with greater fiscal needs, approximated by the importance of the agricultural sector, pay less. However, in the EU, an adjustment of net payments to changes in the actual importance of the specific fiscal need for a country is lacking.The paper was presented at the CESifo Area Conference on Public Sector Economics 2001 in Munich and at a research seminar in Berlin. Thanks to the participants, Matthias Brückner, Johann Brunner, Jeremy Edwards, Friedrich Heinemann, Eckhard Janeba, Roland Strausz, and Alfons Weichenreider for helpful comments. Special thanks to an anonymous referee for many detailed suggestions. All remaining errors are our own.     

Social Exclusion in the European Union

Abstract

This article reviews the development of social policy in the European Union since the mid-1980s. It describes the origins and evolution of the concept of social exclusion, the dominant paradigm for social welfare policy-making in the European Union and its member states. Case examples from Great Britain and Wales provide indications of the impacts for direct services.     

Power Indices in the European Union

We analyze the power of the countries in the decisional mechanism of the European Council along an evolutionary path from the old conventional votes mechanism prevailing in the 15-countries European Union via the rules defined in the Nice treaty for various possible enlargements to the future decisional rules defined in the Constitutional Chart, which will become effective from 2009. The theoretical tools applied are the power indices of Banzhaf and Coleman and Shapley and Shubik within the frame of the multicriteria-weighted-majority games. The results unequivocally show a path moving from a power transfer from the more to the less populated countries toward a country power corresponding to the population numerosity.     

Welfare brokers and European Union migrants' access to social protection

In spite of the existence of an extensive national and supranational legal framework, European Union (EU) citizens who exercise their right to freedom of movement to work in another Member State face numerous hurdles in accessing social protection. While recent scholarship on street-level bureaucracy and on migration and welfare has shed light on the role of discretion and stereotypes in access to rights, little is known about the processes through which such hurdles are overcome. In this article, we focus on a specific strategy which is the recourse to what we call “welfare brokers”. These actors offer assistance to EU migrants to overcome specific cross-border administrative challenges in the area of social protection that derive from their use of the right to freedom of movement. Relying on qualitative data collected with brokers and Romanian migrants working in Germany, the article also demonstrates that welfare brokers attempt to transform the norms, bureaucratic practices and representations that condition access to these entitlements. The article concludes by underlining how the existence of a brokerage industry is a sign of existing inequalities in the exercise of freedom of movement within the EU.     

Women Working in a Greedy Institution: Commitment and Emotional Labour in the Union Movement

This paper seeks to move beyond the restrictions of limited representations of women's participation in the union movement. Through a focus on the union movement as a ‘greedy institution’, it is argued that women's union involvement requires complex and dynamic negotiations with its gendered discourses and practices. As a greedy institution, the union movement demands considerable depth of commitment and loyalty, as well as high levels of work and emotional labour. Based on a study of a network of women union officials, this paper discusses the ways women interpret three main aspects of trade union work: commitment, workload and emotional labour. I argue that the strategies the women officials employ do not remain static within a limited frame of gender difference from men. Rather, they must engage with the effects of male dominance of the union movement as well as the difficulties associated with union activism, family, service to members, leadership, and care in order to take up the political opportunities available in this greedy institution.     

European integration and external sustainability of the European Union: an application of the thesis of Feldstein and Horioka

The Feldstein–Horioka thesis was considered one of the greatest puzzles in economics. Formulated to measure international capital mobility, it has known a process of immunization to be conformed to empirical evidence and respect econometric knowledge. We apply to EU countries a formulation of this thesis which is adequate to test external sustainability and measure international capital mobility. Applying appropriate econometric methods we can accept the hypothesis of external unsustainability for the EU before the enlargement. The enlargement allows the external sustainability of the new EU. The lesser mobility of capital in the countries of the enlargement must be considered as a positive shock on EU industry of financial services.     

Immigration to Spain: implications for a unified European Union immigration policy

A unified immigration policy is one of the prerequisites for establishing the free movement of people within the European Union (EU). This paper considers the difficulties in establishing a joint policy on the free movement of people within the EU by focusing upon changing immigration policies in Spain. By comparing Spain, a country of only recent, small-scale immigration, to Germany, a country with a longer history of non-European immigration, obstacles to developing and effectively implementing coordinated immigration policies among EU members can be elucidated. The administrative control of entry, estimates of legal and illegal immigrants in the country, and the status of bilateral relations with Morocco are examined in order to highlight the political difficulties encountered in a unified immigration policy both within Spanish society and for the EU. Spain is both a threshold to the EU and a destination. Border control may be the easiest part of implementing a joint immigration policy in the EU. It is more difficult to control settlement. In addition, high rates of unemployment may result among the native host country populations as immigrants more readily accept low-skilled, low-paying jobs.     

Human capital and innovativeness of the European Union regions

The objective of this article is to analyze and classify European Union (EU) regions according to human capital and innovativeness. Innovativeness of 225 EU NUTS-2 regions within 2008–2010 is analyzed with special attention paid to human capital. Eighteen indicators of innovativeness and human capital were adapted and transformed into four mutually orthogonal components, with use of factor analysis. The use of factor analysis eliminated the portions of information overlapping in indicators proposed in the beginning of the analysis. It is one of the beneficial differences between the approach presented in this article and the Regional Innovation Scoreboard. A second difference is the scope, for in this article the specific meaning of human capital in the innovation process was highlighted. On this basis the EU regions were classified in five homogeneous groups. It enabled the authors to draw conclusions concerning the areas of innovativeness which need specific support and the potential to be exploited. On the basis of our article concerning the issue of relatively poor innovativeness of some EU regions’ economies, it's worth stressing that underinvestment in the field of human capital is one of the basic causes which determine different results obtained in innovation activity.