The evolution of security industry regulation in the European Union

ABSTRACT

The European private security sector has grown from a handful of small companies at the end of the Second World War into a multibillion Euro industry with thousands of firms and millions of security staff. In Europe, the demands for security is not just expressed notionally but also officially in The European Agenda on Security stating the European Union (EU) aims to ensure that people live in an area of freedom, security, and justice. This article will begin by exploring the role of private security in society. It will then move on to consider the main phases in the development of private security regulation in Europe. Following on from this, some of the main areas of policy development will be considered, such as European bodies, initiatives, and standards. Finally, the article will explore some of the potential options for the future in better regulating the European private security sector. From a historical perspective, the evolution of private security regulation can be divided into three phases: the laissez-faire, the centrifugal, and the centripetal era – each with its own distinct characteristics and impact on the concurrent industry. In the EU where there is the legal framework for the development of a single market in services, the key social partners have been at the forefront of developing a series of standards and guidance documents which promote standards across borders at the European level. However, the institutions of the EU have been reluctant to intervene at a European level in setting minimum standards of private security regulation. Thus, the changing terrain of the EU relating to security, regulation, and the private security industry means the current trajectory may be in need of an injection of more radical thought and consideration.     

Retirement pensions and gender： The Spanish case from the European perspective

The European Union in its task of coordinating the different social protection systems recommends member countries to take steps to prevent economic imbalances caused by ageing populations. Spain and other European countries-such as Sweden, Italy or Germany, follow the trends marked by the European Union with regard to pensions. In recent years, these countries have carried out reforms to be entitled to benefits, increase the proportionality between contributions and benefits and introduce formulas similar to private funded systems. These reforms will lead to retirement pensions linked to contributions becoming an airtight system, thus excluding the most vulnerable workers from them. This work aims to show that this type of restrictive measures despite being formulated in a neutral way, fail to correct-and actually increase-the differences between women and men in employment, since women are more affected by unstable working conditions than men. Lower wages for women and higher incidences of their careers being interrupted to attend to family duties will make access for women to retirement pensions even harder. The shortfalls in the protection of retirement pensions contrast sharply with a common European employment policy which aims to raise the employment rate of women. Having examined the incidence of this type of reforms from a gender perspective, the final aim of the work will be to show whether the European directive against discrimination regarding Social Security, headed by Directive 79/7 and displayed in the European Court of Justice＇s case law, constitutes an adequate regulatory tool to neutralize those reforms which lead to indirect discrimination.     

Gender and sexual orientation in women： The double discrimination

Nowadays, sexual orientation is a cause of discrimination with its own autonomy in laws of European Union. The Treaty of Amsterdam, which came into force on May 1, 1999, marks a significant milestone for homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual persons. In this process, the rich experience of the European Union in combating discrimination due to gender in the workplace is very important. The great opportunity created by article 13 of the Treaty of Amsterdam was the extension of protection to a much wider range of discrimination, including sexual orientation. On the other hand, if we consider the situation of lesbian, bisexual and transsexual women in the workplace, it may be very difficult to ascertain if the discrimination is due to their gender or their sexual orientation. In fact, cases of double discrimination are very common. For example, The Commission＇s 1991 Code of Practices on Sexual Harassment states that lesbian women are disproportionately at risk of sexual harassment. This is revealing the potential overlaps between gender and sexual orientation, with a great difficulty to adapt anti-discrimination protections to deal with these situations.     

欧盟合同之债法律适用制度的新发展

欧盟《合同之债法律适用罗马公约》（以下称《罗马公约》）于2008年转换为共同体的立法——《合同之债法律适用条例》（以下称《罗马条例I》）。《罗马条例I》并不是简单照搬《罗马公约》的规定,而是对《罗马公约》的一些条款作了重新解释或重大修订,这些修订包括：当事人意思自治的调整;当事人未选择法律时合同冲突规则的修订;增加运输合同和保险合同冲突条款;重新界定强制规则以及加强弱势方当事人利益的保护等。《罗马条例I》可以为我国涉外合同之债法律适用立法提供借鉴。     

Persistence of innovation: stylised facts and panel data evidence

This paper investigates whether firms innovate persistently or discontinuously over time using an innovation panel data set on German manufacturing and service firms for the period 1994–2002. It turns out that innovation behaviour is permanent at the firm level to a very large extent. Using a dynamic random effects discrete choice model and a new estimator recently proposed by Wooldridge (2005), I further shed some light on the driving forces for this phenomenon. The econometric results show that past innovation experience is an important determinant for manufacturing as well as for service sector firms, and hence confirm the hypothesis of true state dependence. In addition, the results highlight the important role of knowledge provided by skilled employees and unobserved individual heterogeneity in explaining the persistence of innovation.

苏联战俘事务管理机构沿革(1939～1956)

二战期间,苏联俘获大量战俘,战俘的接收、安置、医疗服务、物资供给、劳动、政治教育和遣返等各方面事务均由苏联内务人民委员会战俘和被拘留人员事务管理总局负责。随着战场形势、战俘数量及战俘政策的变化,管理机构的名称、任务、职能、结构和规模均在发生变化。进入上世纪50年代,多数战俘已被遣返,管理局最终于1953年4月20日被撤销,其职能移交给了监狱管理局。在整个关押期间管理局较为重视战俘事务,在苏联国内经济状况好转的同时,战俘的关押条件也在逐渐改善,战俘发病率和死亡率逐年降低,劳动效率不断提高。     

Child-related leave and women’s labour market outcomes: towards a new paradigm in the European Union?

The current European Union (EU) legislative framework on child-related leave is facilitating an imbalance in the take-up of leave by women over men. There is a consolidated EU right to maternity leave for mothers but there is no parallel EU right to paternity leave for fathers. The EU right to parental leave is for both working mothers and fathers, but its design does not encourage an equal take-up by women and men. The aim of this article is to gain insight into the effects of child-related leave on women’s labour market outcomes. On the one hand, it reviews and analyses economic literature which points to the adverse consequences of leave on women’s earnings, and even on women’s labour market participation when the absences from work are very prolonged. On the other hand, it underlines the new direction followed by the European Commission towards greater equality between men and women at home and at work.     

Redistribution in a political union: The case of the EU

A key function of centralized budgets in federal and political unions is to act as an equalizing mechanism to support economic and social cohesion. This is also the case with the European Union's (EU) budget, which operates as a redistributive mechanism that counteracts the cross-national and cross-regional inequalities created by the single market. Despite the limits on cross-national redistribution imposed by a centrifugal system of representation, the net fiscal position of member states – what they pay to the EU budget minus what they receive from it – is very diverse and has changed quite remarkably over the last decades. In this paper, we investigate how and why the net fiscal position of each member state toward the rest of the EU changes over time. We develop a novel panel dataset (1979–2014) to study how key national and EU-level political and economic variables affect the EU redistributive dynamics. We find that redistribution via the EU budget primarily targets developments in inequality within EU member states, and that an increase in domestic unemployment may also improve the country's fiscal balance. Moreover, we find that voting power in the Council is unrelated to a more positive fiscal balance. However, we find that governments with a centre-right profile are in general more successful in improving their redistributive position vis-à-vis the other member states. This may create a problem of budgetary ‘rent extraction’.     

Rule omission,rule migration and the limits of financial industry power

This paper seeks to deepen our understanding of financial industry lobbying efforts that result in specific regulatory rules being dropped from the regulatory agenda, or what we call ‘rule omission’. Critically, existing research either ignores rule omission or characterizes it as the pinnacle of lobbying success. We argue that only in carefully mapping out industry preferences and tracking what happens to rules following their omission can we say something about the extent to which finance wins or loses in its effort to shape regulation. Our analysis is based on two in-depth case studies from the European Union: (1) solvency rules in the Institutions for Occupational Retirement Provision Directive (IORPP II), where rule omission does reflect a strong case of industry influence; and (2) short selling rules in the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD), a case of rule omission resulting in more stringent rules over industry activities.