Policy Making At The European Periphery

This book examines Croatia's economic and political transformation over the last 30 years. It brings together the best political scientists, macroeconomists and public finance experts from Croatia to provide an in-depth analysis of the Croatian policy-making context and the impact of Europeanization upon its domestic institutional framework. The second part of the book scrutinizes the political economy context and Croatia's long-term macroeconomic under-performance, especially in comparison to other transition economies. The final part explores sectoral public policies, including cohesion policy, education, health, pensions, and local government. The book offers a unique blend of Croatia's political economy framework and public policy analysis.

Europeanization" is a term increasingly used in the social sciences to descibe the impact, convergence or response of politicians and institutions in relation to the European Union. This volume explores the concept in a variety of different settings in order to clarify its meaning.

This book examines the case of Portugal throughout the process of financialisation, in particular the impact on its economy, work and social reproduction. This text is essential reading for students and scholars with an interest in examining the uneven mechanisms and impacts of global finance.

With the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1991, the Eastern European nations of the former socialist bloc had to figure out their newly capitalist future. Capitalism, they found, was not a single set of political-economic relations. Rather, they each had to decide what sort of capitalist nation to become. In Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, Dorothee Bohle and Béla Geskovits trace the form that capitalism took in each country, the assets and liabilities left behind by socialism, the transformational strategies embraced by political and technocratic elites, and the influence of transnational actors and institutions. They also evaluate the impact of three regional shocks: the recession of the early 1990s, the rolling global financial crisis that started in July 1997, and the political shocks that attended EU enlargement in 2004.Bohle and Greskovits show that the postsocialist states have established three basic variants of capitalist political economy: neoliberal, embedded neoliberal, and neocorporatist. The Baltic states followed a neoliberal prescription: low controls on capital, open markets, reduced provisions for social welfare. The larger states of central and eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak republics) have used foreign investment to stimulate export industries but retained social welfare regimes and substantial government power to enforce industrial policy. Slovenia has proved to be an outlier, successfully mixing competitive industries and neocorporatist social inclusion. Bohle and Greskovits also describe the political contention over such arrangements in Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia. A highly original and theoretically sophisticated typology of capitalism in postsocialist Europe, this book is unique in the breadth and depth of its conceptually coherent and empirically rich comparative analysis.

First published in 1994. ln Protecting the Periphery the editors present a series of papers revealing the impact of EU policies on environmental quality in regions at the edge of the European Union and in those lying just outside it. In many cases these regions contain habitats and landscapes of international importance; they have also often escaped some of the environmental damage caused by industrialization. But, as the papers' reveal, attempts by the EU to safeguard these environmental benefits are often contradicted by the EU’s own development policies, bringing air pollution from new roads, contamination from new industries, and leading to habitat destruction from modern agricultural practices and increases in tourism. As the Union pushes for the deepening of the integration process, including completing the internal market, the pressures on the periphery's environment are increasing. Furthermore, the efforts of the periphery to catch-up economically with the developed core can often heighten the tension between economic considerations on the one hand and the need for environmental protection on the other. The studies in this book examine the ambivalent responses to EU environmental policy among policy-makers and environmentalists in the periphery. Both the willingness as well as the capacity of the periphery to protect its environmental heritage are explored. In particular, the administrative capacity, institutional arrangements, political culture as well as economic development needs are taken into account in an examination of the nature of the periphery’s response to and implementation of Union environmental policy. The book will appeal to policy-makers and academics in the countries of the European periphery and to analysts of European policy-making everywhere, especially those concerned with environmental policy and politics.

The onset of the global crisis has emphasised the persistence of substantial differences in development and social progress within the euro area. The specific case of countries located in the southern periphery region has come to the centre stage, due to the harsh economic conditions that all these countries have experienced in the recent past. In the aftermath of the American subprime credit bubble, these countries’ high indebtedness raised doubts as to their ability to sustain public finances, with the financial crisis developing and gaining momentum due to the fragilities presented in the economy. To varying degrees of severity, all of these economies have since been forced to introduce strong fiscal tightening programmes in order to achieve fiscal consolidation, which have translated into recession and rising unemployment. This book undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the causes of the crisis in southern European countries, showing that the ‘Achilles heel’ of these economies is rooted in the dismal evolution of productivity and in a specialisation pattern excessively based on the so-called ‘traditional’, low, and low-medium tech industries, which yield low margins, declining export shares and, ultimately, withering international competitiveness. Such evidence suggests that the southern European periphery industrial growth model has reached its limits, demanding a multidimensional policy approach capable of overcoming the magnitude and complexity of the present crisis. Without denying the need to adjust public and private balance sheets, it is argued that finding a sustainable path out of the present problems requires addressing the challenges of productivity growth and competitiveness in the long term.

At long last, monetary union has dawned in Europe. Eleven member states now share the common currency, forming a larger EMU than many observers, who thought that monetary union would initially be restricted to the core countries of the European Union, expected. The next item on the EMU agenda now is the question how to bring the remaining members of the European Union into the monetary union. I.A. Mourmouras and M. G. Arghyrou address this question from the perspective of Greece, and, with it, future European Union members such as Hungary and Poland. Their book presents a careful and interesting study of the Greek monetary policy experiences over the past 25 years. It demonstrates how Greece moved from an inflation ridden economy characterized by rigid controls of the financial sector to an economy for which an independent central bank and inflation targeting are credible options. The study is not only interesting in itself but also in that it bears important lessons for the development of monetary policy and institutions in the candidate countries of the European Union.