While much has been written about the European Union (EU), most of the scholarly work is concerned with the developments at the European level. It is only recently, that we observe increasing attempts to address this research deficit. Notwithstanding a growing number of studies explicitly...

International cooperation rests on state preferences with regard to the substantive scope, geographical range, and institutional depth of issue-specific devices to over-come collective action problems. Substantive broadening, geographical widening, and institutional deepening are the elixir of...

During the early post-war period, Western trade union movements grew in membership and achieved an institutionalized role in industrial relations and politics. However, during the last decades, many trade unions have seen their membership decline as they came increasingly under pressures due to...

The network metaphor abounds in the fields of regional development studies and of research on forms of subnational government. Unlike the analysis of strategic networks (Powell; Sydow; Staber), of policy networks (Mayntz/ Marin; Kenis/ Schneider) and of policy domain networks (Knoke/ Pappi/...

Since the early 1970s, the scope for national social and economic policy in advanced industrial societies has been constrained by three consecutive changes in the international political economy. These were: 1) the breakdown of the Bretton Woods currency regime of fixed exchange rates and the...

The dramatic rise in international production in recent years stands out as the most decisive factor in the globalization of economic activity. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has been growing very rapidly in the recent past while international trade ceased being the principle mechanism linking...