Sustainable Consumption: An Important but Ambiguous Concept

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip J. Vergragt
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Sustainable Consumption ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Thorstein Veblen ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
The Us

This chapter explores the origins of the concept of sustainable consumption in global policy circles in the 1990s and its subsequent evolution in academia, business, civil society, and policy. It describes how academic research increasingly critiqued the understanding of consumption as an individual act and instead conceptualized it as a systemic issue deeply embedded in the economy, culture, and infrastructure, and how it is structured by life-event decisions like buying a house. It describes how the ecologically-inspired critique of consumption merged with the much older social critique of consumerism going back to Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and the Frankfurt, School and discusses the emergence of alternatives and possible pathways to systemic change. The concept of sustainable consumption has influenced policies in the European Union, on the level of cities, and organizations like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Since the Great Recession of 2008, the concept has acquired new meanings spurred by the economic crisis and, in the US, the demise of the “American Dream”. The chapter concludes by discussing the concept’s ambiguities and possible futures.

Preventive Debt Restructuring and the Nigerian Draft Insolvency Legislation: Lessons from a Comparative Perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-84
Author(s):  
Sanford U. Mba
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Debt Restructuring ◽  
The Us ◽  
Financially Distressed ◽  
Bankruptcy Code ◽  
Second Chance

Recently, the Nigerian Senate passed the Bankruptcy and Insolvency (Repeal and Re-enactment) Bill. This is no doubt a welcome development following the continued demand by insolvency practitioners, academics and other stakeholders for such legislation. The call has not only been for the enactment of just about any legislation, but (consistent with the economic challenges faced by businesses in the country), one that is favourably disposed to the successful restructuring of financially distressed businesses, allowing them to weather the storm of (impending) insolvency, emerge from it and continue to operate within the economy. This article seeks to situate this draft legislative instrument within the present wave of preventive restructuring ably espoused in the European Union Recommendation on New Approaches to Business Rescue and to Give Entrepreneurs a Second Chance (2014), which itself draws largely from Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code. The article draws a parallel between the economic crisis that gave rise to the preventive restructuring approach of the Recommendation and the present economic situation in Nigeria; it then examines the chances of such restructuring under the Nigerian draft bankruptcy and insolvency legislation. It argues in the final analysis that the draft legislation does not provide for a prophylactic recourse regime for financially distressed businesses. Consequently, a case is made for such an approach.

Precarious Work and Young Workers in the United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arne L. Kalleberg
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
The United States ◽  
Young Workers ◽  
Severe Problem ◽  
Precarious Work ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Us ◽  
Training Opportunities ◽  
And Training

This chapter discusses how the growth of precarious work and the polarization of the US labor market have produced major problems for the employment experiences of young workers. A prominent indicator of young workers’ difficulties in the labor market has been the sharp increase in their unemployment rates since the Great Recession. Another, equally if not more severe, problem faced by young workers today is the relatively low quality of the jobs that they were able to get. Other problems include the exclusion of young workers from the labor market and from education and training opportunities; the inability to find jobs that utilize their education, training, and skills; and the inability to obtain jobs that provide them with an opportunity to get a foothold in a career that would lead to progressively better jobs and thus be able to construct career narratives.

Anti-System Politics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hopkin
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Approach ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Us ◽  
Long Term Result ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Right

Recent elections in the advanced Western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges—from both the Left and the Right. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. This book traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the postwar model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s. That shift entailed weakening the democratic process in favor of an opaque, technocratic form of governance that allows voters little opportunity to influence policy. With the financial crisis of the late 2000s, these arrangements became unsustainable, as incumbent politicians were unable to provide solutions to economic hardship. Electorates demanded change, and it had to come from outside the system. Using a comparative approach, the text explains why different kinds of anti-system politics emerge in different countries and how political and economic factors impact the degree of electoral instability that emerges. Finally, it discusses the implications of these changes, arguing that the only way for mainstream political forces to survive is for them to embrace a more activist role for government in protecting societies from economic turbulence.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
José van
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Information Age ◽  
The Other ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Checks And Balances ◽  
The Us ◽  
Autocratic Regime ◽  
Digital Strategy ◽  
National Governments ◽  
State Interference

The epilogue sketches a few scenarios on potential geopolitical consequences of the global paradigm shift toward multiple online platform “spheres.” Currently, the neoliberal US-based platform ecosystem dominates. This ecosystem revolves around the promotion of individualism and minimal state interference, leaving checks and balances to the market. On the other end of the ideological spectrum is the Chinese ecosystem, in which the autocratic regime controls the platform ecosystem via regulated censorship of tech corporations. Squeezed between the US and the Chinese models is the European Union, whose member states neither own nor operate any major platforms in either ecosystem. For European democracies to survive in the information age, its cities, national governments, and supranational legislature need to collaborate on a blueprint for a common digital strategy toward markets and public sectors.

TTIP, CETA, and TiSA Behind Closed Doors

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Panagiotis Delimatsis
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
Trade Negotiations ◽  
The European Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Eu

Secrecy and informality rather than transparency traditionally reign trade negotiations at the bilateral, regional, and multilateral levels. Yet, transparency ranks among the most basic desiderata in the grammar of global governance and has been regarded as positively related to legitimacy. In the EU’s case, transparent trade diplomacy is quintessential for constitutional—but also for broader political—reasons. First, even if trade matters fall within the EU’s exclusive competence, the EU executive is bound by the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) to inform the European Parliament, the EU co-legislator, in regular intervals. Second, transparency at an early stage is important to address public reluctance, suspicion, or even opposition regarding a particular trade deal. This chapter chronicles the quest for and turning moments relating to transparency during the EU trade negotiations with Canada (CETA); the US (TTIP), and various WTO members on services (TiSA).

Disruptive Soft Law and Post-Crisis US Reform

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abraham L. Newman ◽  
Elliot Posner
Keyword(s):  
Financial Markets ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Regulatory Reform ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soft Law ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Us ◽  
International Interaction

Chapter 6 examines the long-term effects of international soft law on policy in the United States since 2008. The extent and type of post-crisis US cooperation with foreign jurisdictions have varied considerably with far-reaching ramifications for international financial markets. Focusing on the international interaction of reforms in banking and derivatives, the chapter uses the book’s approach to understand US regulation in the wake of the Great Recession. The authors attribute seemingly random variation in the US relationship to foreign regulation and markets to differences in pre-crisis international soft law. Here, the existence (or absence) of robust soft law and standard-creating institutions determines the resources available to policy entrepreneurs as well as their orientation and attitudes toward international cooperation. Soft law plays a central role in the evolution of US regulatory reform and its interface with the rest of the world.

scholarly journals An academic perspective on the entrepreneurship policy agenda: themes, geographies and evolution

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Arenal ◽  
Claudio Feijoo ◽  
Ana Moreno ◽  
Cristina Armuña ◽  
Sergio Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Text Mining ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Policy Agenda ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Entrepreneurship Policy ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Content Type ◽  
And Shifts

Purpose Academic research into entrepreneurship policy is particularly interesting due to the increasing relevance of the topic and since knowledge about the evolution of themes in this field is still rather limited. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the key concepts, topics, trends and shifts that have shaped the entrepreneurship policy research agenda during the period 1990–2016. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses text mining techniques, cluster analysis and complementary bibliographic data to examine the evolution of a corpus of 1,048 academic papers focused on entrepreneurship-related policies and published during the period 1990–2016 in ten relevant journals. In particular, the paper follows a standard text mining workflow: first, as text is unstructured, content requires a set of pre-processing tasks and then a stemming process. Then, the paper examines the most repeated concepts within the corpus, considering the whole period 1990–2016 and also in five-year terms. Finally, the paper conducts a k-means clustering to divide the collection of documents into coherent groups with similar content. The analyses in the paper also include geographical particularities considering three regional sub-corpora, distinguishing those articles authored in the European Union (EU), the USA and South and Eastern Asia, respectively. Findings Results of the analysis show that inclusion, employment and regulation-related papers have largely dominated the research in the field, evolving from an initial classical approach to the relationship between entrepreneurship and employment to a wider, multidisciplinary perspective, including the relevance of management, geographies and narrower topics such as agglomeration economics or internationalisation instead of the previous generic sectorial approaches. The text mining analysis also reveals how entrepreneurship policy research has gained increasing attention and has become both more open, with a growing cooperation among researchers from different affiliations, and more sophisticated, with concepts and themes that moved the research agenda forward, closer to the priorities of policy implementation. Research limitations/implications The paper identifies main trends and research gaps in the field of entrepreneurship policy providing actionable knowledge by presenting the spectrum of both over-explored and understudied research themes in the field. In practical terms the results of the text mining analysis can be interpreted as a compass to navigate the entrepreneurship policy research agenda. Practical implications The paper presents the heterogeneity of topics under research in the field, reinforcing the concept of entrepreneurship as a multidisciplinary and dynamic domain. Therefore, the definition and adoption of a certain policy agenda in entrepreneurship should consider multiple aspects (needs, objectives, stakeholders, expected outputs, etc.) to be comprehensive and aligned with its complexity. In addition, the paper shows how text mining techniques could be used to map the research activity in a particular field, contributing to the challenge of linking research and policy. Originality/value The exploratory nature of text mining allows us to obtain new knowledge and reveals hidden patterns from large quantities of documents/text data, representing an opportunity to complement other qualitative reviews. In this sense, the main value of this paper is not to advise on the future configuration of entrepreneurship policy as a research topic, but to unwrap the past by unveiling how key themes of the entrepreneurship policy research agenda have emerged, evolved and/or declined over time as a foundation on which to build further developments.

EUROPEAN FISCAL RULES AS A LIABILITY IN THE TRANSATLANTIC TRADE CONFLICT: LESSONS FROM NiGEM SIMULATIONS

2020 ◽  
Vol 254 ◽  
pp. R54-R66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Dullien ◽  
Sabine Stephan ◽  
Thomas Theobald
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
European Union ◽  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
Fiscal Rules ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Transatlantic Trade ◽  
The Us ◽  
Trump Administration

Under the Trump administration, a transatlantic trade conflict has been escalating step by step. First, it was about tariffs on steel and aluminium, then about retaliation for the French digital tax, which is suspended until the end of the year. Most recently, the US administration threatened the European Union with tariffs on cars and car parts because of Canadian seafood being subject to lower import duties. As simulations with NiGEM show, a further escalation of the transatlantic trade conflict has the potential to slow down economic growth significantly in the countries involved. This is a considerable risk given the fact that the countries have to cope with the enormous negative effects of the pandemic shock. Furthermore, the damage caused by the trade conflict depends on the extent to which the affected countries use fiscal policy to stabilise their economies.

scholarly journals The European Union Green Deal: Clean Energy Wellbeing Opportunities and the Risk of the Jevons Paradox

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (14) ◽  
pp. 4148
Author(s):  
Estrella Trincado ◽  
Antonio Sánchez-Bayón ◽  
José María Vindel
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
European Union ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
International Institutions ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Clean Energy ◽  
The European Union ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Financial Framework ◽  
The Common

After the Great Recession of 2008, there was a strong commitment from several international institutions and forums to improve wellbeing economics, with a switch towards satisfaction and sustainability in people–planet–profit relations. The initiative of the European Union is the Green Deal, which is similar to the UN SGD agenda for Horizon 2030. It is the common political economy plan for the Multiannual Financial Framework, 2021–2027. This project intends, at the same time, to stop climate change and to promote the people’s wellness within healthy organizations and smart cities with access to cheap and clean energy. However, there is a risk for the success of this aim: the Jevons paradox. In this paper, we make a thorough revision of the literature on the Jevons Paradox, which implies that energy efficiency leads to higher levels of consumption of energy and to a bigger hazard of climate change and environmental degradation.

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