A new strategy for the European periphery
The southern European periphery suffered a severe setback in its catching-up process versus Western Europe after the financial crisis with GDP dropping by 10% between 2008 and 2012 and unemployment rates increasing to 20% for Greece, Portugal and Spain. We analyse first the reason for this setback, and then the policy reaction of the national governments and the European partners. Policy reactions mainly focused on restoring price competitiveness. It has important blind spots as far as industrial restructuring, upgrading tourism, making use of globalisation and alternative energies, supporting business starts, connecting education, as well as innovation and firm creation are concerned. There is a lack of national ownership of the reforms on the one hand, and a neglect of the European community and the surplus countries on the other hand, that they could support the southern periphery by measures increasing welfare in the community as well as in the surplus countries. Surplus countries profit heavily by the bifurcation of interest rates for government bonds and by capital flows.
Cloud Computing Adoption Motivation in the European North and South
The European North-South divide has been one of the most important and widely debated problems of Europe for long time. The countries of the European South have for decades lower levels of economic and technological development and performance than the countries of the European North; though there has been a convergence between the European North and South for some time, recently, due to the economic crisis, this trend has stopped, and on the contrary a divergence is observed. It is widely recognized that in order to overcome this negative situation, and achieve a gradual convergence between these two regions, it is important not only to cut wages and public expenditure in the European South (which has been the dominant approach so far), but also to make wider and better use of new technologies and boost innovation. This paper contributes in this direction, comparing empirically the European North and South with respect to one of the most important, innovative and disruptive new information and communication technologies (ICT): the cloud computing (CC). CC is emerging as a new paradigm of providing ICT support of firms’ and activities, which can not only reduce costs (especially investments), but also enable the rapid and low cost experimentation with and exploitation of new emerging technologies, and also support and facilitate innovation and external collaboration. In particular, we empirically investigate and compare Northern and Southern European firms with respect not to the ‘quantity’ of CC use, but to its ‘quality’: their CC adoption motivations and orientations. Our study has been based on a dataset collected through the e-Business W@tch Survey of the European Commission from 556 European firms from the glass, ceramic and cement sectors. It has been concluded that Southern European firms of the above sectors view CC as a means of reducing ICT investment, while Northern European ones view it as a means of supporting and facilitating product/service innovation, and also of reducing cost and increasing capabilities of their existing external electronic collaboration (with business partners and experts) for the development of innovations. Furthermore, both Northern and Southern European firms of the above sectors view CC as a means of experimentation with and exploitation of new emerging technologies.
Strengthening the resilience of an economy: Enlarging the menu of stabilisation policy to prevent another crisis
309 There is an increasing number of analyses of how the current fi nancial crisis came about. They discuss the contribution of the fi nancial sector, its “innovative” products and the ineffi ciency of existing regulation, the imbalances in the global economy and the role of globalisation. They suggest how to combat the present crisis, and also touch on how the economic system in general could react in the long term, and discuss the role of the state.1