EU bilateral trade agreements and the surprising rise of labour provisions

Surprisingly, labour provisions in EU bilateral trade agreements have widened and deepened over the past decade. One would have expected the opposite, given the coming to power of centre-right governments in the early 2000s and a stronger liberalization agenda since 2006. This article addresses this rather remarkable development. First of all it dismisses the argument that protectionist motives underlie the stronger social clauses in EU trade agreements. Instead, drawing on the theory of the life-cycle of norms, it suggests that social trade has become an unobjectionable norm within the EU. The article then offers several explanations for why the social-trade nexus has been barely disputed, and indeed has further expanded through subsequent trade arrangements. These include the stronger influence of the European Parliament, path-dependencies stemming from the EU’s previous template, and the need to gain public support in the face of criticism of free trade agreements. Most importantly, it stresses that the framing of core labour rights as part of a broader ‘sustainable development’ agenda has contributed to their unobjectionable status. While this framing has helped to forge a consensus with regard to the social trade agenda, giving equal status to labour and environmental provisions under the sustainable development umbrella might also have adverse consequences for the concept of labour provisions

Essays on Supply Chain Economic Networks for Disaster Management Inspired by the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic, which was declared by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, negatively impacted virtually all economic and social activities across the globe. As of March 7, 2022, more than 6 million deaths have been associated with COVID-19 disease. This health disaster, unlike many other disasters, is not limited to time or location. It has resulted in intense global competition for many essential products, from Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to ventilators and vaccines and food products. In this dissertation, I construct, analyze, and quantitatively solve a spectrum of supply chain economic network models inspired by realities in the COVID-19 pandemic in four essays. In this dissertation, I first develop a game theory network model for integrating financial and logistical challenges that humanitarian organizations involved in disaster management are faced with. This part of the dissertation illustrates how game theory can be utilized in the modeling and analysis of the behavior of multiple decision-makers that interact with each other in disaster supply chain economic networks under different constraints. I, subsequently, construct the first Generalized Nash Equilibrium (GNE) model with stochastic demands to model competition among organizations at demand points for medical supplies inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. The theoretical constructs are provided, and a Variational Equilibrium is utilized to enable alternative variational inequality formulations. Then, I delve more deeply into an important characteristic of disasters, that of uncertainty, by developing a two-stage stochastic game theory network model. Specifically, the first multistage stochastic GNE model is constructed for the study of competition among multiple countries for limited supplies of medical items in the disaster preparedness and response phases in the COVID-19 pandemic. Illustrative examples and algorithmically solved numerical examples, inspired by the need for N95 masks and ventilators, are presented. Finally, I turn to a key aspect of pandemic disaster management, which is the evaluation of trade instruments that governments have been applying during the pandemic to protect their citizens. Specifically, a unified variational inequality framework in the context of spatial price network equilibrium problems is constructed that focuses on a plethora of essential products, that are in high demand in the pandemic, but short in supply globally. The model allows one to seamlessly introduce various trade measures, including tariffs, quotas, as well as price floors and ceilings

A multi-criteria methodology for the integration of Risk Assessment into Spatial Planning as a basis for territorial resilience. The case of Seismic Risk

Rapid urban development and continuous demands for space have increased the pressure on the territory. The need for this “usable” space, no matter the purpose, leads to an excess of capacities of existing areas and the creation of new areas, both significantly increasing the level of exposure to natural disasters. Statistics show that within a period of almost two decades from 1994 to 2013, 218 million people were affected by natural disasters annually (CRED, 2015). In the situation where the demand for growth is accompanied by an increasing potentiality of damages in economic, social, environmental or cultural terms, disaster risk management (DRM) is having an important focus in terms of research. The way communities and urban systems react to a natural distress is tightly related to the economic and technological development as well as data availability. Developed countries have the capacities to consider mitigation strategies in pre-event situations, which is not always feasible for developing and poor countries. Also, as emphasized by (Gaillard & Mercer, 2012), the issue is related to the fact that disasters affect those who are marginalized and have partial or no access to resources and means of protection. Such paradigm imposes the need to develop preventive strategies focusing on the community, which is directly affected by aftermath of these natural events. The analysis of natural disasters and their impact on the society and the built environment is complex and requires an integration of multi-disciplinary information from social to exact sciences. The main issue that hinders the entire process is mainly related to the effectiveness of transmitting such an information between different stakeholders such as experts, responsible local and national authorities and the community itself. This process is even more difficult in the conditions where there is a lack of information, appropriate tools and also the lack of risk perception by the community, especially in the cases of disasters having a relatively large return period such as earthquakes. The purpose of this research is the analysis of a possible way to integrate disaster risk information within planning instruments aiming towards an inclusive disaster risk reduction (DRR) process through the proposal of a risk assessment methodology at a local scale for the case of seismic events. The analysis is carried out through the proposal of a hierarchic system containing several parameters that characterize firstly the hazard itself and secondly, the built environment in terms of exposure and vulnerability by a combination of a multi-scale information (building and local scale). The selection of relevant parameters, their value, the relationship to one another and their contribution will be given based on a thorough literature research, site visits, questionnaires and experts opinions. The results will be given in the form of a visual spatial information using mapping processes. The main objective is that the proposed methodology will serve as a preliminary tool for several decision-making processes in terms of strategic risk reduction measures, policies, prioritization, fund allocation etc. The methodology is also aimed to serve as an important node that connects the community, the experts and responsible authorities with one another towards an inclusive disaster risk reduction approach.Il rapido sviluppo urbano e le continue richieste di spazio hanno aumentato la pressione sul territorio. La necessità per questo spazio “utilizzabile”, indipendentemente dallo scopo, porta ad un eccesso di capacità delle aree esistenti e alla creazione di nuove aree, in entrambi casi aumentando notevolmente il livello di esposizione ai disastri naturali. Le statistiche mostrano che in un periodo di quasi due decenni, dal 1994 al 2013, 218 milioni di persone sono state colpite ogni anno da disastri naturali (CRED, 2015). Nella situazione in cui la richiesta di crescente utilizzo del terreno è accompagnata da una crescente potenzialità dei danni in termini economici, sociali, ambientali o culturali, la gestione del rischio dei disastri sta avendo un ruolo sempre più importante in termini di ricerca. Il modo in cui le comunità e i sistemi urbani reagiscono ad un evento naturale è strettamente correlato allo sviluppo economico e tecnologico, nonché alla disponibilità dei dati. I paesi sviluppati hanno la capacità di prendere in considerazione strategie di mitigazione in situazioni pre-evento, il che non è sempre fattibile nei Paesi in via di sviluppo e in quelli poveri. Inoltre, come sottolineato da (Gaillard & Mercer, 2012), la questione è legata al fatto che i disastri colpiscono la parte di comunità emarginata e che ha accesso parziale o nullo alle risorse e ai mezzi di protezione. Tale paradigma impone la necessità di sviluppare strategie preventive incentrate sulla comunità, che è direttamente colpita dalle conseguenze di questi eventi naturali. L'analisi dei disastri naturali e del loro impatto sulla società e sull'ambiente urbano è complessa e richiede un'integrazione di informazioni multidisciplinari dalle scienze sociali a quelle esatte. Il problema principale che ostacola l'intero processo è principalmente legato all'efficacia della trasmissione di tali informazioni tra le diverse parti interessate come esperti, autorità locali e nazionali che hanno responsabilità in tal senso e la comunità stessa. Questo processo è ancora più difficile nelle condizioni in cui mancano informazioni, strumenti adeguati e anche la mancanza di percezione del rischio da parte della comunità, soprattutto nei casi di catastrofi con un periodo di ritorno relativamente lungo come i terremoti. Lo scopo di questa ricerca è l'analisi della possibilità di integrare le informazioni sul rischio di disastro all'interno degli strumenti di pianificazione che mirano a un processo inclusivo di riduzione del rischio, attraverso la proposta di una metodologia di valutazione del rischio stesso a scala locale per il caso di eventi sismici. L'analisi viene condotta attraverso la proposta di un sistema gerarchico contenente diversi parametri che caratterizzano in primo luogo l’azzardo stesso e in secondo luogo l'ambiente urbano in termini di esposizione e vulnerabilità mediante una combinazione di informazioni multiscala (edificio e scala locale). La selezione dei parametri rilevanti, il loro valore, la relazione tra loro e il loro contributo, saranno analizzati sulla base di un'approfondita ricerca bibliografica, visite in situ, questionari e opinioni di esperti. I risultati saranno forniti sotto forma di informazioni spaziali visive utilizzando processi di mappatura. L'obiettivo principale è che la metodologia proposta serva da strumento preliminare per diversi processi decisionali in termini di misure strategiche di riduzione del rischio, normative, definizione delle priorità, allocazione dei fondi, ecc. Lo scopo ulteriore della ricerca è anche quello che la metodologia proposta serva da nodo di collegamento tra la comunità, gli esperti e le autorità responsabili tra loro verso un approccio inclusivo alla riduzione del rischio delle catastrofi

The Politics of Exhaustion: Immigration Control in the British-French Border Zone

Within a climate of growing anti-immigration and populist forces gaining traction across Europe, and in response to the increased number of prospective asylum seekers arriving in Europe, recent years have seen the continued hardening of borders and a disconcerting evolution of new forms of immigration control measures utilised by states. Based on extensive field research carried out amongst displaced people in Europe in 2016-2019, this article highlights the way in which individuals in northern France are finding themselves trapped in a violent border zone, unable to move forward whilst having no obvious alternative way out of their predicament. The article seeks to illustrate the violent dynamics inherent in the immigration control measures in this border zone, characterised by both direct physical violence as well as banalised and structural forms of violence, including state neglect through the denial of services and care. The author suggests that the raft of violent measures and micro practices authorities resort to in the French-British border zone could be understood as constituting one of the latest tools for European border control and obstruction of the access to asylum procedures; a Politics of Exhaustion

The progression of vulnerability: a multi-scalar perspective on disasters, the case of Chaitén, Chile

This research analyses policy responses to disasters in Chile. The main objective is to explore linkages between temporally and spatially distant processes of policy, governance and decision-making, and the materialisation of disaster vulnerability in the form of ‘unsafe conditions’. The study focuses on the progression of vulnerability in a post-disaster context, critically reflecting on the multiplicity of agencies and pressures in creating and increasing vulnerability of a specific territory at local scale. The central argument is that the Chilean model of disaster risk management and reduction is dominated by top-down and reactive approaches that tend to diminish the potentials of policy responses to disasters and ultimately became sources of vulnerability and risk. The research’s analytical framework is grounded in disaster studies and specifically it adopts a social constructionist approach to disaster, vulnerability and geographical scale focused on the Pressure and Release model. The latter allows one to look at the state territorial organisation of Chile as a structural factor in the national model of disaster management, and to place root causes and dynamic pressures of disaster vulnerability within the multi-scalar configuration of the country. The thesis chooses the Chaitén volcanic eruption that occurred in May 2008 in Los Lagos Region of Chile, and the disaster policy context in the country as the empirical base on which the argument is put forward. Several policy responses are examined using qualitative methods at national, regional and local scales, revealing the centralisation of disaster governance in Chile as a key factor in producing inadequate responses to the disaster that failed to utilise people’s knowledge and local organisational capacities. This disaster policy context mediated the materialisation of four unsafe conditions in Chaitén: the uneven distribution of risks; the limited access to services; the erosion of trust in public authorities; and the weaknesses of emergency planning. The research re-problematises and suggests new ways of ‘thinking vulnerability’ and disaster governance from a wider multi-scalar perspective. It explains that when policy responses to disasters do not consider local capacities and realities, these can facilitate the (re)production of unsafe conditions, and contribute to and perpetuate the generation of risks over time. This could help to challenge some still dominant views found in Chile and in many other national governments that dissimulate the causality of disaster generation and risk accumulation

Labour markets, technological change, and natural disasters. With special reference to the race between education and technology, the task content of jobs and, the demand for ICT labour after disasters

This thesis examines the interactions between labour markets, technological change, and natural disasters in Chile, which has been considered as one of most successful Latin American countries according to economic growth and structural economic reforms over the last decades. One of these major reforms was trade liberalization implying an important absorption of foreign technologies biased towards skilled labour which increased from 10.1 per cent in 1980 to 30.4 per cent in 2018. At the same time, the Chilean higher education experienced substantial growth between the 1980s and 2010s, showing that people enrolled in tertiary education sextupled. In 1984, 11% of the 18 – 24 enrolled in tertiary education while in in 2018, it was 67%. In this regard, Chile supplies an environment particularly well suited to study the technological change driving the skill premium evolution. in Chile, like most Latin American countries, the skill premium is suggested as the main force driving the observed rise and fall of income inequality in recent decades (Acosta et al., 2019; Guerra-Salas, 2018; Parro & Reyes, 2017). The decline in income inequality is an important step in improving the population’s assessment of their well-being. Furthermore, Chile supplies a unique location for studying the potential for technological upgrading in the aftermath of catastrophes since it is characterized by recurring severe earthquakes. Earthquakes supply the opportunity to analyse technological upgrading due to their unexpected occurrence and destructive ability. Therefore, examining the interactions between technology, labour markets and natural disasters has important implications for our understanding of the interrelations between these economic forces. The thesis is divided into three essays. The first essay aims to test the Race between Education and Technology, RBET, model empirically for Chile using recurrent bi-annual labour survey data from 1980 to 2018. The main aspects that motivate this research are the lack of evidence in the post-2000 period and "estimation difficulties" reported by past studies. These difficulties imply mainly the computation of positive coefficients standing for the expected negative relationship between the skill premium, i.e., the gap between skilled and unskilled wages, and the relative supply of skilled labour as posited by the RBET theory. Besides, a positive coefficient would imply the computation of a negative elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled labour. We also find "estimation difficulties" using cointegration techniques. Alternatively, we apply an Unobserved Component Model, UCM, estimated by Bayesian inference, UCM-Bayesian, whose results are more consistent with the RBET model. We find that both demand and supply factors explain the evolution of the skill premium. In the context of the race between technology and education, in the pre-2000 period, the relative demand attributable to skill-biased technological change, SBTC, with its rapid acceleration contributing to a high skill premium, is suggested as the dominant factor. However, in the post-2000 span, the demand factor was surpassed by strong increases in the relative supply, suggesting education as the dominant factor inducing a declining trend in the skill premium. Furthermore, our estimate for the elasticity of substitution is 6.5. The value iv greater than one implies that skilled and unskilled workers are imperfect substitutes but more substitutable than commonly thought, given the past estimates for this parameter. The second essay evaluates the influence on the skill premium for the task-content of jobs and specific workers' abilities. We exploit the text data from job posting ads covering 2009-2018 (approx. 189,000 ads) to capture demand for tasks and skills. Our task-related analysis tests the expected complementarity between skilled labour and non-routine cognitive (analytical and interactive) and routine cognitive tasks. In our skills-related analysis, we evaluate whether cognitive and social abilities influence the skill premium. Our results show weak evidence for non-routine cognitive tasks as drivers of the skill premium progress, while routine cognitive tasks do not explain this wages differential. Also, we do not find evidence that cognitive or social abilities, separately or in combination, explain the evolution of the skill premium. The apparently inferior importance of cognitive tasks and abilities might imply an inefficient educational investment or unwanted changes in the occupational ladder for higher educated workers. The potential impact natural disasters have in improving demand for labour in the Information and Communication Technologies, ICT, sector is explored in the third essay. We explore whether disasters can accelerate the current technical progress featured by ICT, assuming that updated and ICT compatible equipment replaces the destroyed equipment. In turn, this faster rate of technological adoption would lead to increases in demand for ICT labour. We use a severe earthquake (8.8 Mw) that struck Chile's Central Region on February 27, 2010, as a natural experiment and a subsample from online job posting data used in the second essay. We implement a structural topic model, STM, to estimate the difference in the prevalence of topics related to ICT labour (as proxies for upgrading new technologies) and the Construction sector labour by comparing two years before to two years after the earthquake. Our results show that the prevalence of the ICT labour topic does not substantially change, suggesting that there was no technological replacement following the earthquake. In contrast, the prevalence of the Construction labour topic was significantly different after the disaster, suggesting that reconstruction activities lead to employment differences in the Construction sector

Stories of extractivism and transformation

Diese Studie befasst sich mit den durch den Bergbau verursachten Umwelt- Sozial- und Territorialkonflikten in der Region Tarapacá, deren Probleme nicht nur mit den Umweltauswirkungen, sondern mit der allgemeinen Behandlung der Natur zum Zwecke des Profits und des Exports verbunden sind. Die Monographie konzentriert sich auf die Konfrontation zwischen dem Staat, den indigenen Gemeinschaften und den Bergbauunternehmen und beschreibt nuanciert die vielen Beziehungen und Verflechtungen zwischen ihnen. Im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit stehen die verschiedenen politischen, wirtschaftlichen, institutionellen und kulturellen Elemente im Zusammenhang mit der Entwicklung von Bergbau und ihre Folgen und Interdependenzen die in den einzelnen Kapiteln beschrieben und dargestellt werden. Im Rahmen nationaler Umweltvorschriften, die die Entwicklung des Bergbaus und anderer Tätigkeiten mit großen Auswirkungen auf die Umwelt zu regulieren versuchen, generiert der heutige ressourcenabbau bestimmte Vereinbarungen mit den lokalen Gemeinschaften die in der Nähe der Bergbaugebiete leben. Das Fehlen von Vereinbarungen kann zu Konflikten und Widerstand seitens der Gemeinschaften führen. Dadurch könnten bestimmte Bergbauprojekte mit hohen Investitionskosten gestoppt oder verzögert werden. Auf diese Weise werden Institutionen, unternehmerisches Engagement, Partizipation und Widerstand in komplexen Beziehungen miteinander verwoben. Die Arbeit integriert auch einen historischen Rahmen in Anbetracht des früheren Salpeterabbaus in der Region und der Entwicklung der Chilenischen Ressourcenpolitik des 20. Jh. mit starken Einfluss auf die nationale Vorstellung vom Bergbau als grundlegende Wirtschaftstätigkeit für die nationale Entwicklung. Sowohl werden auch die Merkmale des chilenischen Neoliberalismus und die Rolle des Bergbaus anhand einer Extraktivismus Kritik behandelt.This study addresses the environmental, social, and territorial conflicts caused by mining in the Tarapacá region, whose problems are linked to environmental impacts and the general treatment of nature for profit and export. The study focuses on the confrontation between the state, indigenous communities, and mining companies and describes the many relationships and interconnections between them in nuanced terms. This work focuses on the various political, economic, institutional, and cultural elements associated with mining development and their consequences and interdependencies, which are described and illustrated in each chapter. In the context of national environmental regulations that seek to regulate the development of mining and other activities with significant environmental impacts, contemporary resource extraction generates certain agreements with local communities living near mining areas. The lack of agreements can lead to conflict and resistance from communities, and this could stop or delay specific mining projects with high investment costs. This way, institutions, corporate engagement, participation, and resistance become interwoven in complex relationships. The work also integrates a historical framework considering the former saltpeter mining in the region and the development of Chilean resource policies of the 20th century, with a strong influence on the national conception of mining as a fundamental economic activity for national development, discussing at large the characteristics of Chilean neoliberalism and the role of mining