Varieties of capitalism, quality of government, and policy conditionality in Southern Europe: Greece and Portugal in comparative perspective

This paper, drawing primarily on the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) theoretical approach to political economy and the institutional theory of Europeanisation with emphasis on the Quality of Government (QoG) approach, examines possible variation between Greece and Portugal, in terms of their responses to pressures from Europeanisation before the crisis, as well as to MoU conditionality during the crisis. The empirical evidence seems to vindicate the fundamental assumptions of the VoC approach about the impact of variation among member states of the Eurozone, in terms of models of capitalism/political economy, on the crisis in Greece and Portugal. However, QoG is identified as key explanatory variable for variation in adaptation/adjustment capacity between the two countries, especially during the crisis. Additionally, there seems to be no evidence that cultural aspects, such as the level of social trust/ capital, can account for variation in adaptation performance between the two countries during the crisis

Social capital, institutional networks and European regional policy: Adaptation and adjustment in the Aegean Islands.

This thesis focuses on the role of social capital and institutional networks in determining the capacity for learning and adaptation of the regional systems of governance within the European regional policy environment, by facilitating collective action among the actors and by shaping the local institutional interactions through the processes of exchange and socialization. The main hypothesis is that, although the Europeanization of public policy has a positive impact on the processes of institution-building, learning and adaptation at the local level, and particularly in the less-favoured regions of Europe, pre-existing qualitative features of the local institutional infrastructure play the most important role in the bottom-up learning and adaptation processes. In particular, the presence of dense institutional networks between public and private actors and social capital endowments that enable them to be involved in the provision of public goods and services facilitates the learning process, that is the capacity of institutional networks to adapt their structure and policies to meet the changing politico-economic conditions (European environment). The research compares the response of two regions of Greece (Southern and Northern Aegean Islands) -similar in physical resources and financial support provided by the national and European regional policy-to the challenges of Europeanization. Chapter one establishes the general theoretical framework of the thesis, linking social capital, institutional networks and learning within the theory of regional development. Chapter two defines learning and adaptation in European regional policy and establishes the main theoretical hypotheses of the thesis, the methodology for measuring specific structural features of the networks and social capital, and criteria for assessing the learning capacity. Chapter three presents the structural and cultural specificities of the Greek socio-political system, as well as the main aspects of the national regional policy. Chapters four and five map the institutional infrastructure in both regions, drawing their political, economic, institutional and cultural features. Chapters six and seven examine the processes of institutional and policy adaptation to European structural policy in both regions and evaluate their learning capacity. Finally, chapter eight compares the two cases and draws general conclusions regarding the role of social capital and institutional networks in facilitating learning and adaptation within European regional policy and extracts main implications for integration theory

Time-Dependent Alternative Route Planning

We present a new method for computing a set of alternative origin-to-destination routes in road networks with an underlying time-dependent metric. The resulting set is aggregated in the form of a time-dependent alternative graph and is characterized by minimum route overlap, small stretch factor, small size and low complexity. To our knowledge, this is the first work that deals with the time-dependent setting in the framework of alternative routes. Based on preprocessed minimum travel-time information between a small set of nodes and all other nodes in the graph, our algorithm carries out a collection phase for candidate alternative routes, followed by a pruning phase that cautiously discards uninteresting or low-quality routes from the candidate set. Our experimental evaluation on real time-dependent road networks demonstrates that the new algorithm performs much better (by one or two orders of magnitude) than existing baseline approaches. In particular, the entire alternative graph can be computed in less than 0.384sec for the road network of Germany, and in less than 1.24sec for that of Europe. Our approach provides also "quick-and-dirty" results of decent quality, in about 1/300 of the above mentioned query times for continental-size instances

The future of the US Dollar and its competition with the Euro

Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods Global International System in 1971, the world economy has experienced significant currency volatility. The major economies of the world have addressed such volatility differently. The EU has chosen to follow a monetary union and introduced successfully a new currency. The U.S. has paid less attention to the fluctuations of the dollar and has pursued an independent monetary policy to promote national economic stability. Japan has seen its currency appreciate significantly. This paper argues that while trade and growth across the globe are doing well, financial developments are intensifying the competition between the U.S. dollar and the euro. Three possible future scenarios are developed and discussed.peer-reviewe

Asymmetrical economic and institutional changes in the Western Balkans : cooperation with the European Union

The Western Balkans have historically been a poor area of Europe. The total population of the Western Balkans is 24.7 million. Ethnic differences of long standing have led to conflicts and to political and economic instability. Poverty and instability have combined to produce a vicious circle of institutional backwardness. Recent conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo have aggravated an already adverse economic situation. GDP in 1999 was substantially lower than that in 1989. The EU plans to enter into contractual relationships with all the Western Balkans in the form of Stabilization and Association Agreements (SAAs). The pacts are aimed at helping to establish economic and political stability, to implement institutional reforms, to practice regional free trade and cooperation and to privatize the economies of Western Balkans. These are also the presumed goals of the Western Balkans. This study focuses on a review of the progress made by the Western Balkans toward meeting the above stated challenges. A main conclusion is that the attainment of these goals has been asymmetrical for economic, political and institutional reasons.peer-reviewe

REX: A Realistic Time-Dependent Model for Multimodal Public Transport

We present the non-FIFO time-dependent graph model with REalistic vehicle eXchange times (REX) for schedule-based multimodal public transport, along with a novel query algorithm called TRIP-based LAbel-correction propagation (TRIPLA) algorithm that efficiently solves the realistic earliest-arrival routing problem. The REX model possesses all strong features of previous time-dependent graph models without suffering from their deficiencies. It handles non-negligible exchanges from one vehicle to another, as well as supports non-FIFO instances which are typical in public transport, without compromising space efficiency. We conduct a thorough experimental evaluation with real-world data which demonstrates that TRIPLA significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art query algorithms for multimodal earliest-arrival routing in schedule-based public transport