Employment Effects of FDI in Mexico's Non-Maquiladora Manufacturing

This paper analyses whether foreign direct investment (FDI) has contributed to employment generation in Mexico's non-maquiladora manufacturing sector. Drawing on highly disaggregated FDI and employment data, we estimate dynamic labour demand functions for blue and white collar workers, including FDI as well as its interaction with major industry characteristics. FDI has a significantly positive, though quantitatively modest impact on manufacturing employment in Mexico. This applies to both white collar and blue collar employment. The employment enhancing effects of FDI are larger in export oriented industries. In more capital-intensive industries, the employment effect of FDI remains positive for blue collar workers but not white collar ones.     

The Return of ‘Social Europe’: Ideas and Positions of German Parties towards the Future of European Integration

Politics in Eastern Europe. By George Schöpflin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. £12.99 pb.

Eastern Europe since 1945. By Geoffrey Swain and Nigel Swain. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1993. £10 pb.

Revolution in East‐Central Europe. The Rise and Fall of Communism and the Cold War. By David S. Mason. Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press, 1992. £9.50 pb.

Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe. By J.F. Brown. Twickenham: Adamantine Press, 1991. £18.40 pb.

The New Democracies in Eastern Europe. Party Systems and Political Cleavages. Edited by Sten Berglund and Jan Åke Dellenbrant. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1991. £39.95 hb.

Developments in Eastern European Politics. Edited by Stephen White, Judy Batt and Paul G. Lewis. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1993. £11.99 pb.     

Minimum Wages and their Alternatives: A Critical Assessment

Do minimum wages reduce in-work poverty and wage inequality? Or can alternative policies do better? Germany suffers from high unemployment among low-skilled workers and rising wage dispersion at the lower end of the wage distribution. We analyse the impact on employment, wage inequality, public expenditure, and incomes of poor households of three different policy options currently being discussed in Germany: a statutory minimum wage, a combination of minimum wages and wage subsidies, and pure wage subsidies to low-paid workers. In doing so, we distinguish between perfectly competitive and monopsonistic labour markets. We find that a minimum wage of EUR 7.50 would cost between 410,000 and 840,000 low-paid jobs, increasing the fiscal burden, while only moderately raising the income of poor households. With pure wage subsidies, the government can always ensure more favourable employment effects. Combining a minimum wage with a wage subsidy turns out to be extremely costly and inferior to wage subsidies in all respects.     

How to change other people's institutions: discursive entrepreneurship and the boundary object of competition/competitiveness in the German banking sector

Abstract

The paper explores recent public debates about the structure of the financial system in Germany. It pays particular attention to their symbolic-strategic dimension, that is, to attempts by several institutional entrepreneurs to reformulate the criteria of organizational legitimacy, concentrating on the sense-making and legitimization processes involved in institutional persistence or change. The paper discourse-analyses a campaign by institutional entrepreneurs – mainly representatives of commercial banks – who attempted to homogenize the criteria of organizational legitimacy in the German banking sector by questioning the fundamentals of the three-pillar system and the non-commercial banks. Institutional entrepreneurs are understood as discursive entrepreneurs whose actions refer to institutionalized generalizations of value. In the case of the financial sector in Germany, it was the generalized value of competition/competitiveness that served as a discursive device to legitimize the attempts of commercial banks to alter the institutional structure.     

Notes on Contributors

In the 1990s, several public corruption scandals were uncovered in Sweden. This article focuses specifically on local corruption, and our purpose is to examine whether a case can be made that problems of public corruption in Swedish municipalities have increased. By applying instruments from the institutional rational choice framework, we reach the conclusion that there are indeed reasons to suspect that retrenchment initiatives and organisational reforms over the last two decades, often labelled ‘new public management’, have increased the risk of corruption. Although hard empirical data do not yet exist, the suspicion that public corruption in Swedish municipalities may have become an increasing problem cannot be disregarded. Hence, we conclude by calling for further empirical research in this field.     

Shame on you,John! Laws,stigmatization, and the demand for sex

The present article contributes to the literature on prostitution by shedding light on the effects of the criminalization of buying sex on the amount of prostitution bought, as well as on the proposed theoretical mechanisms underlying this change. We find indications that criminalizing the buying of sex may decrease the quantity of sex bought. While we find that stigma influences the demand for sex, we do not find that stigma increases as a result of the law. Therefore, the possible reduced quantity of sex bought is probably due to the more direct risk of getting caught.     

Doping control analysis of selected peptide hormones using LC-MS(/MS)

With the constantly increasing sensitivity and robustness of liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry-based instruments combined with enhanced reproducibility as well as mass accuracy and resolution, LC-MS(/MS) has become an integral part of sports drug testing programs particularly concerning the detection of peptide hormones. Although several of the relevant peptidic drugs such as insulins (Humalog LisPro, Novolog Aspart, etc.), growth hormone releasing peptides (GHRPs, e.g., GHRP-2, GHRP-6, Hexarelin, etc.), and insulin-like growth factors (e.g., IGF-1, IGF-2, long-R(3)-IGF-1) are currently analyzed using dedicated top-down analytical procedures, i.e. employing specifically tailored sample preparation procedures followed by targeted LC-MS(/MS) measurements focusing on intact analytes, first approaches towards multi-analyte methods have been established. These allow the determination of the prohibited substances in blood and urine doping control specimens following therapeutic applications. In addition, the use of new complementary devices such as ion mobility analyzers, e.g., in hybrid mass spectrometers yielded promising data for the differentiation of isobaric insulins, which outlines the potential to further accelerate and multiplex doping control analytical assays to meet the continuously increasing demands of rapid and unambiguous test methods. Moreover, the potential of LC-MS/MS to target recombinant peptide hormones such as human growth hormone using bottom-up approaches has been demonstrated by targeting proteotypic peptides that unambiguously differentiate the recombinant molecule from the naturally occurring and endogenously produced analog.     

Campaigning on an upper level? Individual campaigning in the 2009 European Parliament elections in its determinants

Election campaigns are not only party campaigns, but depend to a significant degree on the efforts and activities of individual candidates. While some country-specific analyses of candidate campaigning have been done, large-N comparative studies are missing. The 2009 European Election Candidate Study, conducted in all 27 EU countries, does allow for such a comparative analysis. On the basis of this data, the article takes a closer look at three core components of individual campaigns and their respective determinants: duration, intensity, and the use of different campaign tools. Our findings show that only a combination of factors on the individual, party, and country level is able to explain significant amounts of the observed variance in each of the core components.     

Do laws affect attitudes? An assessment of the Norwegian prostitution law using longitudinal data

The question of whether laws affect attitudes has inspired scholars across many disciplines, but empirical knowledge is sparse. Using longitudinal survey data from Norway and Sweden, collected before and after the implementation of a Norwegian law criminalizing the purchase of sexual services, we assess the short-run effects on attitudes using a difference-in-differences approach. In the general population, the law did not affect moral attitudes toward prostitution. However, in the Norwegian capital, where prostitution was more visible before the reform, the law made people more negative toward buying sex. This supports the claim that proximity and visibility are important factors for the internalization of legal norms.