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The current political situation in Europe has amplified economic sanctions as a retaliatory measure for states not directly involved in the conflict but wanting to influence the political situation. The purpose of this paper is to further understand the interplay of the neutrality principle and employment of economic sanctions.

Through an extensive literature review, heavily based on the publications of the Swiss Confederacy, neutrality as a foreign policy serving to promote Swiss interests is explored. The room for interpretation and freedom of action in the neutrality principle is highlighted above all.

Economic sanctions are compatible with the neutrality principle, but do not necessarily further the same purpose. Political pressure to participate in sanctions does not take into consideration the ways in which the credibility of neutrality can be implicated, as well as the value of protecting Switzerland’s role as an international mediator.

The consistency with which the neutrality principle is translated into the modern geopolitical context is crucial for its longevity. The novelty of the current political sanctions, still unfolding, demands a careful examination into the history of neutrality and the use of sanctions. No better insight can be offered than by the development of neutrality in the history of the titan of neutrality, Switzerland.

International asset recovery proceedings may be hindered by several obstacles, especially in the case of “failed states” or of states that experience a regime change. In this context, Switzerland, a country with extensive experience in asset recovery, attempted two legislative leaps forward, the first in 2011 and the second in 2016. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the legislative innovations in Switzerland, with special reference to their strengths, weakness and compatibility with human rights standards.

This paper draws on legal scholarship, jurisprudence, reports and other open source data, to analyze two important legislative innovations in Switzerland [Law on the Restitution of Assets of Criminal Origin of 2010 (LRAI) and law on assets of illicit origin (LVP).

The two Swiss legislative initiatives that will be examined (LRAI and LVP) are innovative in nature, but serious weaknesses and obstacles to asset recovery remain unaddressed. Despite their flaws, these two legislative innovations can inspire positive change in international and national norms. They can be viewed as part of a work-in-progress for the reinforcement of asset recovery proceedings and international cooperation in this domain.

Since the new law on asset recovery (LVP) came into force (July 1, 2016), this has been the first study examining the strengths and weaknesses of the adopted text, its compatibility with human rights standards and its potential influence on international standards of asset recovery.

This paper aims to investigate, using stakeholder map methodology, showing power, urgency, legitimacy and concerns of different actors, the current state of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Switzerland. Previous research on CSR in Europe has made few attempts to identify stakeholders and their contribution to this topic.

To derive this map, publicly available documents were explored, augmented by 27 interviews with key stakeholders (consumers, media, government, trade unions, non-profit organisations [NPOs], banks, certifiers and consultants) and management of different companies (multinational enterprises [MNEs], small- and medium-sized enterprises [SMEs] and large national companies). Using MAXQDA, the quantified codes given for power, legitimacy and urgency were triangulated between self-reporting, external assessments and statements from publicly available documents and subsequently transferred into stakeholder priorities or, in other words, into positions in the map. Further, the codes given in the interviews for different CSR interests and the results from the document analysis were linked between stakeholders. The identified concerns and priorities were quantitatively analysed in regard to centrality and salience using VennMaker.

The paper identified SMEs, MNEs and cooperating NPOs as being the most significant stakeholders, in that order. CSR is, therefore, not driven primarily by regulators, market pressure or customers. Further network parameters substantiated the importance of SMEs while following an unconventionally informal and idiosyncratic CSR approach. Hence, insights into these ethics-driven, unformalised business models that pursue broader responsibility based on trust, traditional values, regional anchors and the willingness to “give something back” were formed. Examples of this strong CSR habit include democratic decisions and abolished hierarchies, handshake instead of formal contracts and transparency in all respects (e.g. performance indicators, salaries and bonuses).

In total, 27 interviews as primary data that supplements publicly available documents are clearly only indicative.

The research found an innovative, vibrant and practical CSR model that is emerging for reasons other than conventional CSR agendas that are supposed to evolve. In fact, the stakeholder map and the CSR practices may point at a very different role businesses have adopted in Switzerland. Such models offer a useful, heuristic evaluation of the contribution of formal management systems (e.g. as could be found in MNEs) in comparison to the unformalised SME business conduct.

A rarely reported and astonishing feature of many of the very radical SME practices found in this study is that their link to commercial strategies was, in most cases, not seen. However, SMEs are neither the “poor relative” nor the abridged version of CSR, but are manifesting CSR as a Swiss set of values that fits the societal culture and the visionary goals of SME owners/managers and governs how a sustainably responsible company should behave. Hence, as a new stance and argument within CSR-related research, this paper concludes that “informal” does not mean “weak”. This paper covers a myriad of management fields, e.g. CSR as strategic tool in business ethics; stakeholder and network management; decision-making; and further theoretical frameworks, such as transaction cost and social capital theory. In other words, this research closes scientific gaps by at once applying quantitative as well as qualitative methods and by merging, for the first time, network methodology with CSR and stakeholder research.

The purpose of this article is to provide empirical evidence about the potential positive effects of switching from given non-reciprocal trade preferences granted under the Swiss Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) for developing countries (DCs) to negotiated reciprocal trade preferences under a Free Trade Agreement (FTA).

In a case study of Tunisia’s exports to Switzerland, the authors apply methods of matching econometrics, namely, Propensity-Score Matching and Nearest-Neighbor Matching. Hereby, they are able to identify the average treatment effect on the treated.

Overall preferential exports increased by 125 per cent after the entry into force of the FTA in 2005 until the end of the observation period in 2011. Additionally, an analysis of the agro-food and textile sectors likewise indicate boosting preferential exports in the amount of 100 per cent.

Case studies in this vein have their disadvantages. The greatest disadvantage is the lack of generalization. In contrast to studies estimating the potential effects of an FTA for several countries, the authors are not able to generalize their results based on a single case.

Because trade preferences under the Swiss GSP are offered to the country group of DCs as a whole, non-reciprocal trade preferences are not tailored to the export structure of a particular DC. By switching from non-reciprocal to negotiated reciprocal trade preferences, DCs such as Tunisia expect to negotiate terms which are tailored to their export structure as well as better conditions than competitors from countries which are still beneficiaries of the GSP.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate explicitly the switch from non-reciprocal to reciprocal trade preferences using econometric matching techniques.

This paper presents a general survey of the Swiss economy. It emphasises the various factors that have been put forward to explain the very low unemployment rate recorded in Switzerland up to the beginning of the 1990s. It also analyses the factors which may be held responsible for the dramatic reversal of the Swiss labour market situation, by considering the modification in the employers’ and workers’ behaviour in Switzerland as well as the changes observed in the structure of the foreign labour force. It comes to the conclusion that the unemployment observed since 1991 is not simply a consequence of a deterioration in the functioning of the Swiss labour market compared with earlier periods, but rather a result of changes in immigration policies and also the reflection in the statistics of a truer picture of the labour market imbalance created by the restructuring of the economy.

Purpose – We analyze segregation between immigrants and natives at the firm level and explore the connection between segregation and wage inequality in Switzerland.

Methodology/Approach – Our approach accounts for the interaction between skill level and immigration status (work permit). First, we calculate exposure rates in order to analyze segregation at the firm level along these two dimensions. Second, we examine the role of segregation in the explanation of wage inequality between different skill–nationality groups. We use data from the Swiss Wage Structure Survey 2002, an employer–employee database that records individual wages among a very large sample of establishments in all industries, covering approximately 42,000 firms and 1 million workers.

Findings – Our results show that interfirm segregation is particularly pronounced for unskilled foreign workers and for recently arrived, highly skilled foreigners. The former earn lower wages than equally skilled Swiss workers, and the latter are paid higher wages than highly skilled Swiss workers. In both cases, interfirm segregation accounts for almost the entire wage differential.

Originality/Value of paper – This paper presents a generalization of the approach used by Groshen (1991) to the multigroup case by defining segregation with respect to the two dimensions of nationality and skill. The use of multigroup exposure rates is common in studies of neighborhood segregation (e.g., Bayer et al., 2004), but our paper shows that they can also be fruitfully applied in the analysis of interfirm segregation and wage inequality.