S&;T Parks and business incubators in middle-sized countries: the case of greece

This paper links the policy context regarding S&T parks to the objectives and characteristics of the established parks and incubators in a relatively small, converging European country. S&T parks and incubators in Greece during the past decade and a half have gradually shifted in terms of ownership and management from university/research institute to the private sector and in terms of financing from public to private funds, also involving the provision of seed capital and access to venture capital. This gradual shift toward more private engagement has created a variety of models out of which, it is hoped, successful innovative companies will emerge in larger numbers than in the past.

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An Investigation of the Public Deficts and Government Spending Relationship: Evidence for Greece

This paper tests the validity of the Buchanan-Wagner hypothesis for Greece, that increases in public spending are the result of the tolerance of large deficits over the period 1961–1994. To test this hypothesis, three unit-root pretests, the Dickey-Fuller, Phillips-Perron and Kwiatkowski et al. and maximum likelihood estimation techniques of cointegrating vectors and a vector error-correction model are employed. A long-run relationship is found to exist among government spending, deficit, income,wages and adult population and the importance of short-run deviations are presented. The empirical evidence suggests that Buchanan and Wagner hypothesis, seems to find support for Greece in the long-run and the short-run. Further, productivity in the public sector is lower than in the private sector and the growth of income is not an important determinant of the increase in the relative size of public spending.     

The Cultural Mainstreaming Clause of Article 151(4) EC: Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity or Hidden Cultural Agenda?

Abstract:  The purpose of this article is to examine the cultural competences attributed to the Community, placing particular emphasis upon the cultural powers conferred by paragraph 4 of Article 151 EC, which entrusts the European institutions with the task of taking cultural aspects into account in their action under the various provisions of the EC Treaty, in order to respect and to promote cultural diversity. The cultural cross-sectional clause of Article 151(4) EC, by calling for a reshaping of EC decision-making in other policy areas, which have to give due consideration to the impact they might have on cultural matters, enables the attainment of cultural objectives under EC headings other than Article 151 EC. In an attempt to inquire into this less-widely discussed facet of EC cultural action, the analysis highlights the principal characteristics of Article 151(4) EC and explores the influence it has exerted on both judicial and legislative Community practice.     

Enhancing Employees’ Work Performance through Organizational Justice in the Context of Financial Crisis. A Study of the Greek Public Sector

In a period of economic crisis, the increasing pressure of sparse financial resources and the structural reforms in labor law are factors pushing and forcing managers of both public and private organizations to do more with less. The current study explores how employees’ performance in the public sector is affected by perceptions of organizational justice in terms of resource allocation (e.g., benefits and compensation). The responses received from a sample of 490 employees working for public organizations in Greece indicated that work performance is significantly and positively related not only to employees’ satisfaction with pay, but also to employees’ perceptions of distributive and procedural justice.     

From porn to cybersecurity passing by copyright: How mass surveillance technologies are gaining legitimacy … The case of deep packet inspection technologies

Recent coverage in the press regarding large-scale passive pervasive network monitoring by various state and government agencies has increased interest in both the legal and technical issues surrounding such operations. The monitoring may take the form of which systems (and thus potentially which people) are communicating with which other systems, commonly referred to as the metadata for a communication, or it may go further and look into the content of the traffic being exchanged over the network. In particular the monitoring may rely upon the implementation of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies. These technologies are able to make anything that happens on a network visible and recordable. While in practice the sheer volume of traffic passing through a DPI system may make it impractical to record all network data, if the system systematically records certain types of traffic, or looks for specific patterns in all traffic, the privacy concerns are highly significant. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to show that despite the increasing public awareness in relation to the capabilities of Internet service providers (ISPs), a cross-field and comparative examination shows that DPI technologies are in fact progressively gaining legal legitimacy; second to stress the need to rethink the relationship between data protection law and the right to private life, as enshrined in Article 8 of the European Convention on human rights and Article 7 of the European Charter of fundamental rights, in order to adequately confine DPI practices. As a result, it will also appear that the principle of technical neutrality underlying ISP's liability exemptions is misleading.     

Oil prices and economic activity in Greece

The paper studies the relationship between oil prices and economic activity in Greece during the period 1982:1–2008:8. Different empirical methods are used to estimate whether oil price changes affect asymmetrically the economic activity. A regime-switching model (RS-R) and a threshold regression modeling (TA-R) are applied which have the advantage to capture the dependence structure of the series both in terms of constant and variance. The empirical evidence suggests that the degree of negative correlation between oil prices and economic activity strengths during periods of rapid oil price changes and high oil price change volatility.     

An examination of the causal relationship between government spending and revenue: A cointegration analysis

This paper tests the validity of the proposition that there is a causal relationship between government expenditure and government revenue for Greece over the period 1957–1993. The empirical analysis employs tests of cointegration as pre-tests for Granger tests of causality. The empirical evidence suggests that there is a long-run relationship between government spending and government revenue and expenditures cause revenues.     

Evidence on gender wage differentials in Greece

The paper studies the earnings differential between genders in Greece employing quantile regression analysis and applying a variant of the selection-adjusted Oaxaca and Ransom (1994) decomposition methods to explain the components of the wage differentials. The results suggest that, in Greece, substantial differences in wages between men and women can be identified. Decomposing the wage gap between genders the results show that the difference in wages is attributed mainly to the unexplained part and to a lesser extent to the employee’s endowment. In all deciles of the wage distribution the wage differentials between genders are not explained by differences in the productive characteristics of the employed but rather they constitute the unexplained part of the wage differential.