Economic Integration and Vulnerability in the EU Neighbourhood

In 2004, the EU launched the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), a unified policy framework towards its neighbours in the external EU periphery, aiming at strengthening prosperity, stability and security around its geopolitical borders. However, in-depth empirical analysis provides clear-cut evidence that, while the size and composition of trade flows between the EU and the ENCs may be growing, they are not favourable for the ENCs from the perspective of export diversification, in terms of either products or number of destinations. This condition increases their exposure to volatility in international markets. These results provide valuable insight into economic integration theory and for policymaking.     

Aspects of childhood in rural Greece: Children in a mountain village (ca. 1900–1940)

This essay examines childhood in a mountain village in central mainland Greece during the early 20th century and the interwar period. It gives an overview of an analytical case study conducted by the author within the context of the project “Historical Archives of Greek Youth” at the Greek National Research Center. The article draws on various sources, although principally on oral evidence. After a brief survey of the general and local socioeconomic context, it looks at children's lives and socialization inside and outside the household, focusing on family economy and interfamilial relationships within the context of home, school, community, and play, and tracing the relations of these domains to family and household. It points to the existence of childhoods rather than childhood, defined by gender and the specific socioeconomic position of the family. It argues that rural mountain society in Greece did not see its future in agriculture and examines the extent to which school education of boys functioned as a means of family urbanization and social mobility. Children alternated between traditional social structures and urban living patterns.     

Homicide and infanticide in Stockholm 1920–1939

This article studied 45 cases of homicide and infanticide in Stockholm District Court 1920–1939 and compared them with cases in Sweden in the 1990s. Compared with homicide in Sweden today, fundamental similarities were found in the category of domestic homicide, but with the important differences that extended suicides have decreased and changed in character from being passive to becoming active, and from having been committed by many women to being committed mainly by men. Drunken brawls are the same in character, but have increased with time. The free access of alcohol and the financial means of a large group of relatively young people can explain this increase. Infanticide has decreased considerably, indicating that social development has reduced the incitement to this type of killing. The view of offenders' responsibility in the inter-war period depended on their gender and whether they were intoxicated by alcohol. The view of insanity has changed with time, but regarding alcohol no comparable material was available. Finally, the lessons we can learn from studying the inter-war period is that domestic violence has to be taken seriously and the alcohol factor, with its sometimes negative consequences, has to be accepted, unless we want to fundamentally change our society and way of life.     

The profession of deputy. The idea of political representation in liberal Spain

This article attempts to provide insights into the concepts of political representation developed by Spanish liberalism during the middle of the nineteenth century, contextualised by comparison with other European models. The study of electoral legislation, parliamentary debates, essays about suffrage, and other less theoretical publications (press, propaganda) gives information about the prosopographical profile of those members of parliament who were highly involved in the development of electoral legislation, a dynamic group especially concerned about bringing meaning to the representative system and giving legitimacy to parliament. A second group of conclusions relates to the concepts of political representation which they developed. The concept of representation in liberal discourse rested on three components: the political capacity of electors and candidates, the influences which were considered legitimate and necessary, and the implementation of the right to vote along with the institutions deemed to command and to channel it. The arguments may have varied depending on the ideological profile of the parties, but they also shared certain common features because of the dominant political culture of the time.     

How international sanctions worked: Domestic and foreign political constraints on the Brazilian informatics policy

From 1985 to 1989, a trade conflict between the United States and Brazil developed around Brazil's protectionist information technology policy. During that period, and under the threat of trade sanctions, some changes were made in the Brazilian policy. The effectiveness of sanctions in promoting policy changes in Brazil resulted not only from economic losses but also from the shift provoked in the balance of political support for the policy within Brazilian society. Moreover, sanctions were effective not because they affected the interests of groups benefiting from the policy, but because they pushed previously uncommitted groups to join the opposition to it.     

Measuring Socio-economic Status in the Millennium Villages: The Role of Asset Index Choice

How are poverty analyses and poverty traps assessments affected by the choice among conventional methods of asset index construction? To address this question, this article uses panel data from four sites in the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) in Malawi, Tanzania, Mali and Ghana to study the relationship between eight asset indices and the sensitivity of findings related to poverty rates, poverty transitions and poverty traps to the index used. We find that although estimations of poverty rates and transitions are largely consistent across indices, evidence of poverty traps can be conditional on which asset index is used. The asset indices studied include structural income, principal components, factor analysis and a reduced set of assets reflecting the portfolio assessed in the Demographic Health Survey (DHS) data.     

What Drives Intermediate Local Governments’ Spending Efficiency: The Case of French Départements

The restructuring of the allocation of governmental competencies in France has increased the importance of subnational governments by transferring additional tasks. We analyse the efficiency of public spending on the intermediate government level for the 96 départements in metropolitan France in 2008. Spending efficiency is measured using Data Envelopment Analysis. Results indicate significant room for improvement and we detect an average spending inefficiency of 12%. To explain efficiency, a bootstrapped truncated regression is applied. The second-stage regression shows that efficiency is also determined by exogenous factors and identifies the distance to the national capital, inhabitants’ income and the share of inhabitants older than 65 as significant determinants of efficiency.     

Reinventing ‘new’ Europe: Baltic perspectives on transatlantic security reconfigurations

This article examines the self-positioning of the three Baltic states in international politics in relation to the major structural pressures challenging the status quo of the transatlantic security configuration. The constitutive role of the Russia-Georgia war of 2008, the global economic recession, the debt crisis in the eurozone, and the shifting policy preferences and force projection of the United States towards Asia are explored as the key sources of the emerging Baltic security predicament. The empirical conclusions of the poststructuralist discourse analysis conducted for this study demonstrate how the Baltic states, in particular Estonia, have recently come to redefine the contents of ‘new’ Europe, thereby shifting the extant fault lines within the European Union.     

Effectiveness of Ethics Codes in the Public Sphere: Are They Useful in Controlling Corruption?

This study aims at determining the real effect of the implementation of a code of ethics on the solution of ethical problems in the public sphere, considering corruption as the most important non-ethical behavior. With that aim, 154 national administrations whose information on ethical codes is available on the UN's website are analyzed.

Our findings stress the absence of any influence of codes on corruption problems in the public context, both in developed and developing countries. The level of education is the most important determining factor in the control of corruption, especially in developing countries.