The Return of the State? French economic policy under Nicolas Sarkozy

This paper addresses the EU’s influence on the design of market-building objectives and dispute settlement mechanisms in Mercosur and SADC over time. It argues that such influence has had an independent effect on the evolution of regional institutional design that is not reducible to mere functional dynamics, which dominant explanations emphasize. Instead, it suggests that EU influence is best conceived as a process of spurred emulation, according to which major political or economic crises in the regions have led to the increasing emulation of EU arrangements, spurred by the EU’s active involvement in the process. This has, however, neither led to a wholesale copying of EU institutional models nor to the adoption of EU practices, but EU templates have regularly been adapted to fit with policy-makers’ normative convictions, especially their continuing concerns about national sovereignty

Nuclear magnetic resonance of ion implanted 8^8Li in ZnO

We report on the stability and magnetic state of ion implanted $^8$Li in single crystals of the semiconductor ZnO using $\beta$-detected nuclear magnetic resonance. At ultradilute concentrations, the spectra reveal distinct Li sites from 7.6 to 400 K. Ionized shallow donor interstitial Li is stable across the entire temperature range, confirming its ability to self-compensate the acceptor character of its (Zn) substitutional counterpart. Above 300 K, spin-lattice relaxation indicates the onset of correlated local motion of interacting defects, and the spectra show a site change transition from disordered configurations to substitutional. Like the interstitial, the substitutional shows no resolved hyperfine splitting, indicating it is also fully ionized above 210 K. The electric field gradient at the interstitial $^8$Li exhibits substantial temperature dependence with a power law typical of non-cubic metals.Comment: 15 pages and 11 figure

The Rise and Fall of State-Owned Enterprise in the Western World. Edited by Pier Angelo Toninelli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 320. $49.95.

This book offers historical perspectives on the origins and purposes of state-owned enterprises in the United States and Western Europe, the performance of these companies, and the growing dissatisfaction with public ownership, culminating in a wave of privatizations over the past twenty years. It combines analytical essays on various aspects of public ownership with a series of country cases (Germany, Italy, Britain, France, Spain, Austria, and the United States). As is often the case with edited volumes, not all the contributors see eye-to-eye. The sharpest contrast is between the paean to the developmental state offered by Erik Reinert on the one hand, and the neoliberal understanding that informs the concluding essay by Louis Galambos and William Baumol on the other. For Galambos and Baumol, the experience of public enterprise teaches us that there is no substitute for the profit motive and the rigors of fierce competition in eliciting growth of output, productivity, and innovation from the individual firm (p. 308). The other authors, while closer to Galambos and Baumol s position than to that of Reinert, nonetheless offer a more nuanced perspective on public ownership.

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this paper: Robert Boyer, Peter Hall, Ellen Immergut, Bruno Palier, Wolfgang Streeck, Kathleen Thelen, Nicolas Vron, and John Zysman. the post-dirigiste French state failed to shrink; by some measures, it has become bigger than ever. This chapter uses a comparison of France and Japan to recast understandings of the changing place of the state in today's global economy. We advance two main claims. The first is that the road to dirigiste rollback is paved with new state interventions. Moreover, these interventions are not simply transitional in nature. Rather, they constitute a core feature of a more market-centered political economy. In France, de-dirigisation was purchased at the expense of expanded state activity in the social arena. Getting the state out of industrial policy required getting the state into social and labor market policy. The policy innovations of the past twenty years have been designed to pacify and demobilize potential opponents of market- led adjustment. Once regarded as a "welfare laggard," France now has the biggest welfare state outside, and labor market spending also approaches Scandinavian levels. Our second claim, inspired by the Japanese case, is that the failure or unwillingness to construct a European-style welfare state tends to generate three pathologies among statist political economies: 1) the diversion of industrial policy from economic modernization to job protection; 2) a growth in new state activities unaccompanied by the benefits of a market-led political economy; 3) limits on the possibilities for economic liberalization. As Japan's economy began to slow in the 1970s, Japanese authorities consciously decided to avoid created a European-style welfare state. Officials, particularly within the Ministry of Finance, feared that genero..

Normes de cooperation et efficacite economique - comparaison internationale 1ere partie : France-Japon : un produit, deux facons de faire ; 2eme partie : Local economic development in postwar france from an 'affaire d'etat' to 'le developpement par le bas'?

Available at INIST (FR), Document Supply Service, under shelf-number : AR 15195 / INIST-CNRS - Institut de l'Information Scientifique et TechniqueSIGLEFRFranc