Von Environmental Governance zu Landscape Governance: Multi-Level-Governance und Politics of Scale

Governance has definitely become a very iridescent concept in recent years. The term is widely used, meanwhile, in almost all social-science disciplines as well as in the political process. The intention of this paper is not so much to clarify these sometimes vague meanings but to highlight some special characteristics of environmental governance connected with the restructuring of the spatial dimensions of politics. It starts from the assumption that the quest for multi-level decision making is particularly pressing for environmental governance. However, multi-level governance raises concern about the constitution of various spatial levels and their relationships with each other, as discussed under the term of politics of scale. Moreover, it is argued that for environmental governance the spatial reference is strongly connected with another challenge, which concerns the question of how to deal with the biophysical conditions of particular places? The term landscape governance is introduced to tackle this question without referring to an ontologically given space. Thus, landscape governance deals with the interconnections between socially constructed spaces (the politics of scale) and 'natural' conditions of places. For this task, the concept of societal relationships with nature is introduced and applied to the term 'landscape' as a bridging concept between social and natural sciences. The paper illustrates the approach of landscape governance with examples of problem-oriented interdisciplinary research at the UFZ-Centre for Environmental research in Leipzig, eastern Germany. --Environmental governance,scale,politics of scale,landscape,societal relationships with nature

Foreign direct investment, investment incentives, and firing costs: A disadvantage for "inflexible Europe"?

Investment incentives targeted at attracting multinational firms have been extensively documented and researched, and empirical evidence has shown them to be influential. The same is not true of exit costs. Yet, as recent theory suggests, there may be a trade-off between entry incentives and costs of exit, for example, due to employment protection. This paper focuses on just that trade-off in the case of US multinationals in 33 host countries. Our results suggest that both entry incentives and firing costs are important and ignoring the latter neglects an important dimension in firms’ location decision. This has implications for Europe as a location for FDI, as European labor markets are generally considered relatively inflexible compared to, for example, the US.

Jigsaw: investigative analysis on text document collections through visualization

This article describes the Jigsaw system for helping investigative analysis across collections of text documents. Jigsaw provides multiple visualizations of the documents and the entities within them to help investigators discern embedded stories and plots. Our early focus within Jigsaw has not been on legal documents and E-discovery, but we feel that the system may have potential in these areas as well. This article illustrates Jigsaw’s views and operations using Enron email archives as example documents

Foreign acquisition, plant survival, and employment growth

This paper analyses the effect of foreign acquisition on survival probability and employment growth of target plant using data on Swedish manufacturing plants during the period 1993-2002. An improvement over previous studies is that we take into account firm level heterogeneity by separating the targeted plants into those within Swedish MNEs, Swedish exporting non-MNEs, and purely domestic firms before foreign takeover. The results, controlling for possible endogeneity of the acquisition dummy using an IV and propensity score matching approach suggest that acquisition by foreign owners increases the lifetime of the acquired plants only if the plant was an exporter. The effect differs depending on whether the acquisition is horizontal or vertical. We also find robust positive employment growth effects only for exporters, and only if the takeover is vertical, not horizontal.Acquisitions; plant survival; employment growth; multinational enterprises

Price Cost Margins and Exporting Behaviour: Evidence from Firm Level Data

This paper examines whether exporting activity matters for firm's price cost margins. The recent literature on exporting and productivity shows that exporters on average are more efficient than nonexporters. If that is the case we may also expect them to have different mark-ups. We investigate this issue using company level data for UK manufacturing industries. The measurement of mark-ups follows the recent approach presented by Roeger (1995). Our results show that, on average, exporters have higher mark-ups than non-exporters. We also distinguish sectors into homogeneous and differentiated goods producing. This distinction shows that we only find higher mark-ups for exporters in differentiated goods sectors, not in homogeneous sectors.exports, mark-ups, price cost margins, productivity

Does foreign direct investment affect wage inequality? An empirical investigation

We use a panel of more than 100 countries for the period 1980 to 2002 to analyse the relationship between inward foreign direct investment (FDI) and wage inequality. We particularly check whether this relationship is non-linear, in line with a theoretical discussion. We find that the effect of FDI differs according to the level of development: we depict two different patterns, one for OECD (developed) and one for non-OECD (developing) countries. Results suggest the presence of a non linear effect in developing countries; wage inequality increases with FDI inward stock but this effect diminishes with further increases in FDI. For developed countries, wage inequality decreases with FDI inward stock and there is no robust evidence to show that this effect is non-linear.Foreign Direct Investment, Wage Inequality, Multinational Firms

Spillovers from Foreign Firms through Worker Mobility: An Empirical Investigation

While there has been a large empirical literature on productivity spillovers from multinationals this literature treats the channels through which these spillover effects work as a black box. The innovation of this paper is to investigate whether spillovers occur via worker mobility. We use data on whether or not the owner of a domestic firm has previous experience in a multinational, and relate this information to firm level productivity. Our results suggest that firms which are run by owners that worked for multinationals in the same industry immediately prior to opening up their own firm are more productive than other domestic firms.Foreign direct investment; Spillovers; Worker mobility; Training

Services Outsourcing and Innovation: An Empirical Investigation

We provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing, domestic outsourcing, profits and innovation using plant level data. We find a positive effect of international outsourcing of services on innovative activity at the plant level. Such a positive effect can also be observed for domestic outsourcing of services, but the magnitude is smaller. This makes intuitive sense, as international outsourcing allows more scope for exploiting international factor price differentials, therefore giving the establishment higher profits and more scope to restructure production activities towards innovation. We also find that international services outsourcing has a positive effect on profitability, as predicted by theory, while this is not true for domestic sourcing. The results are robust to various specifications and an instrumental variables analysis.innovation, services outsourcing, offshoring, R&D

Multinational companies and wage inequality in the host country: the case of Ireland.

Multinationales Unternehmen; Technologietransfer; Lohntheorie; Neue Wachstumstheorie; Theorie; Schätzung;