Search results

This article provides an overview and analysis of 50 years of European policies, actions, and challenges to align its higher education and research, as well as lessons learned from this for similar initiatives elsewhere.

The study builds on a comprehensive overview and study of policy documents and scholarly literature to identify by decade the main policies and actions and the related challenges towards a European Higher Education and Research Area.

The findings make clear the key rationales, challenges, shifts and lessons to be learned from 50-year European policies for the alignment of higher education.

Its value lies in the historical overview and analysis of current initiatives, in particular the European Universities Initiative (EUI), to provide a historical and geographical context, which might give insight for similar initiatives elsewhere.

This paper aims to understand the discrepancy between Germany’s immediate positive response to the so-called “Europe 2015's refugee crisis“ and the strict asylum legislation adopted in Germany in the following year.

The discrepancy is attributed to external and internal forces. The external force is Germany’s obligation to adhere to the Common European Asylum System. The internal force is the role of the different policy actors. The paper focuses on the role of the media as an example of a private policy actor. Through adopting the theory of the social construction of target populations, the paper studies how the media constructs “asylum seekers”, the target of the new asylum legislation. The role of the media is analyzed using the methodology of qualitative content analysis of a selected number of newspaper articles.

The majority of the studied articles problematized receiving and hosting refugees and focused on the reason behind migration differentiating between asylum seekers fleeing conflict areas and all others who might be abusing the asylum channel. The findings of the content analysis, as such, resonate with the amendments that focused on facilitating the integration of accepted “refugees” but restricted further entry. As such, it could be argued that these findings explain the influence of the media on the amendments and as such provide an explanation to the discrepancy between the initial response and the amendments.

The analysis focused on one newspaper. The findings, as such, are not representative. The aim is only to provide an example of how the German media dealt with the refugee crisis and to suggest using the theory chosen by the paper to analyze the link between asylum legislation and the construction of asylum seekers. To understand how asylum legislation is influenced by how asylum seekers are constructed, more studies are needed. Such studies could analyze the role played by other media outputs and/or the role played by other policy actors in constructing the target of the policy.

The media’s response is based on analyzing a sample of newspaper articles published by a German newspaper following the so-called 2015 refugee crisis. Accordingly, the findings represent an original endeavor to understand how the media reacted to the crisis.

Container liner shipping companies started expanding their business by investing in container port terminals in the late 1990s. This market entry results in an extensive presence of vertically integrated liners and terminals. This study aims to explore the competition effects of this vertical integration trend based on a regional (European) analysis. In particular, it extracts lessons from the European Commission (EC) cases on the competition effects of vertical integration. The critical analysis of the cases examined at the institutional level intends to reach conclusions on whether liner–terminal vertical integration harmed or advanced competition in the relevant markets and/or the extent that there is a need to revise the current policy practices.

This study critically assesses the EC’s decisional practices in port container terminal vertical mergers in the last 25 years (1997–2021). Based on a literature review comparing maritime and competition economists' perspectives, it reviews the types of mergers examined, the methodology followed for relevant market definition and calculation of market shares and the estimated competition effects. The Hamburg–Le Havre area is the port range used as a case study for comparing the decisional practice with actual market developments. These container ports serve the greatest consuming market of final and intermediate goods in Europe and are gateways to Central and Eastern Europe.

The assessment identifies a need for expanding the investigation as a precondition for reaching conclusions on both the anti- and pro-competitive effects. First, only a limited number of transactions have been notified to the EC. Second, the empirical research identified a gap in this process, as there were no decisions (phase I) on vertical mergers between 2008 and 2016. Third, the exante assessment has not applied a phase II in-depth analysis to any case due to the absence of competition concerns. Finally, due to the absence of complaints, there is a lack of any ex post assessment of the effects of vertical integration.

This assessment is important for understanding the current and emerging features of intra-port and inter-port competition and the potential effects that the continuation and expansion of liner companies' vertical integration strategies will have along maritime supply chains. It also contributes to the broader discussion on liner companies' strategies, such as the research and policy-making efforts around the globe to understand the impact of both vertical and horizontal integration.

These discussions are critical for a diversity of businesses that use liner shipping services or provide facilities and services to container shipping lines or ports. They are important for the interests of customers and consumers as they could inform any needed re-visiting of competition policy to protect from the dominance of any market developments that would lead to conditions limiting competition. Expanding analysis on the competition effects of non-notified mergers would help a better understanding of market changes.

Enhancing competition and limiting monopolies is valuable from a consumer's perspective. This is more so in the case of maritime trade that serves the needs of societies. The study contributes by generating a better understanding of how decision-makers have worked towards that direction and what realignments are worthy.

There are no previous comprehensive reviews and analyses of the ways that policy-makers at the regional level have addressed the competition effects of vertical integration strategies of liner shipping companies when enhancing competition is valuable from a consumer perspective. Comparing maritime economists and competition, the study, via its literature review, also offers a comparison of maritime and competition perspectives on these competition effects, allowing positioning of how effective decisional-making practices have been.

The development of Research Management and Administration (RMA) in Europe is strongly connected with the development of the Science and Technology (S&T) policy of the European Union (EU). These policies were the result of a continuous debate between the member states and the European Commission and European Parliament.

Although there is no data on the early development of RMA, there are some publications on the history of the development of the S&T policy in Europe: the excellent publication ‘A History of European Union Research Policy’ by Luca Guzzetti (Guzzetti, 1995). Guzzetti’s book investigates the history of EU research policies from 1948 up to the preparation of the Fourth Framework Programme (FP) (1994–1998).

The RMA aspects are constructed mainly by oral history complemented with some written sources. The history shows a gradual development of the profession unevenly spread in time and European geography. This has mainly with the EU enlargement in the same period, when new member states were connected to the FP. The profession started with a few colleagues’ way back in the eighties of the last century as financial people were dealing with the first European financial reporting up to the present day where RMA is becoming a field of work attracting many new colleagues.

This article focuses on regional-level cooperation in higher education by examining the functional, organizational and political approaches (FOPA) framework for higher education regionalization and using supra-national regional universities as established and successful examples of regional-level higher education cooperation among countries.

A conceptual framework is used to provide the structure for analyzing the key approaches to higher education regionalization, followed by an analysis of supra-national regional universities to demonstrate the application of the model.

The FOPA framework for higher education regionalization includes three approaches. The first is the functional approach, which includes both collaborative academic and research activities among higher education institutions as well strategies and policies to help align systems across a region. The second is the organizational approach, which focuses on networks, organizations, institutions and programs, which facilitate partnerships. The third is the political approach, which includes regional-level agreements, declarations and strategic plans to promote higher education collaboration. Key higher education activities for each approach are discussed in generic terms, with examples provided from major regions of the world.

The research was based on desk research only. No interviews were conducted.

A conceptual analysis and a model were provided for the concept of regionalization of higher education and for regional universities, which can help readers locate their interests and research in the regionalization of higher education. Examples of three different types of regional universities were provided to give concrete illustrations of a regional university.

One of the rationales driving regional universities is to address and increase a sense of regional identify and to meet the social, economic and educational needs of the specified region.

Regional universities, such as the University of West Indies, Arab Open University and the Pan-Africa University, are an understudied phenomenon. Using them as innovative and sustainable examples of higher education regional cooperation and the FOPA model, this study illustrates how single-campus, multiple-campus and virtual regional universities are functioning to meet the diversified needs and priorities across a region through cooperation among countries.

This paper aims to attempt to provide an overview of the copyright legal framework for audiovisual resources in Europe and Greece, how Audiovisual (AV) content is currently licensed by Greek providers and how licenses or copyright exceptions enable its reuse. The motivation for this work was the development of an aggregation service for audiovisual resources in Greece, the Open AudioVisual Archives (OAVA) platform.

Copyright licenses and exceptions in the European Union and in Greek Legislation have been thoroughly reviewed along with the reuse of content, based on the terms of Fair Use, Rights Statements and Creative Commons. Licensing issues for the most well-known aggregation services, such as Europeana, Digital Public Library of America, Trove, Digital New Zealand and the National Digital Library of India, have also been studied and considered. Audiovisual content providers in Greece have been recorded, and their licensing preferences have been analyzed. Pearson’s chi-square test was applied to test the relationship between the provider’s type, resources’ genre and licenses used.

Despite the abundance of copyright legislation in the European Union and in Greece, audiovisual content providers in Greece seem to ignore it or find it difficult to choose the right license. More than half of them choose to publish their resources on popular audiovisual platforms using the default licensing option provided. Creative Commons licenses are preferred for audiovisual content that falls into the following categories: open courses (almost exclusively) and interviews and digital collection/research projects (about half of the content).

This paper examines audiovisual content aggregation, in the EU and Greece, from a legal point of view. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first attempt to record and analyze the licensing preferences of Greek AV content providers.

Recent developments in the EU’s anti-corruption strategy have brought the EU closer to meeting the UNCAC’s objectives, i.e. the Proposal for a Directive on combating corruption (2023) and the Proposal for a Directive on Asset Recovery and Confiscation (2022). This paper aims to discuss these developments from the perspective of the UNCAC, to identify missing elements in the EU’s asset recovery mechanisms.

Critical approach towards EU anti-corruption policy (discussing the problems and solutions). Review of EU developments in asset recovery law.

There is a political will on the part of the EU to fight corruption through the rules enshrined in the UNCAC. However, improving EU law by introducing a new type of confiscation of unexplained wealth and criminalising illicit enrichment, without establishing convergent rules for the return of corrupt assets from EU territory to the countries of origin, cannot be seen as sufficient action to achieve the UNCAC’s objectives. In modelling mechanisms of the return of assets, the EU should search for solutions to overcome the difficulties resulting from the ordre public clause remaining a significant factor conditioning mutual legal assistance.

This paper discusses the possible input of the EU, as a non-State Party to the UNCAC, to advance implementing the UNCAC solutions on asset recovery by establishing convergent rules for the return of corrupt assets from EU territory to countries of origin.

The aim of the present study is to shed light on the role of legal practitioners, namely, lawyers and notaries, in the fight against money laundering: Are they considered as facilitators or obstacles against money laundering? How does the global and the EU legal framework deal with the legal professionals?

The research follows a deductive approach attempting to respond to questions such as: How do the lawyers’ and notaries’ societies react in front of the anti-money laundering measures that concern them and why? What are the discrepancies between the lawyers’ professional secrecy and the obligations that EU anti-money laundering legislation assigns them?

This study disclosures the response of the European union and international legal and regulatory framework as well as the reflexes of the international and European legal professionals’ associations to this danger. It also demonstrates the reaction of lawyers against European union anti-money laundering legislation, to the point that it limits not only the confidentiality principle but also the position of the European judicial systems to the contradiction between this principle and the lawyers’ obligation to report their suspicions to the authorities.

To fulfil the study goals, it was necessary to overcome some obstacles, like the limitation of existing sources. Indeed, transnational empirical research considering the professionals who facilitate money laundering is narrow. Besides, policymakers and academics only recently expressed more interest in money laundering and its facilitators.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study the legal professionals’ role not only in money laundering practices but also in anti-money laundering policies.