Diversity in Employment Patterns in North-West Europe : A Regional and Sectoral Approach
The decline in Germany's capacity to provide employment for its population has become one of the most discussed economic questions of the turn of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. It is a change that has occurred despite the economy's continuing strong performance on the most obvious criterion of national competitiveness: capacity to sell goods abroad. Particularly puzzling from some perspectives is that the two parts of Europe that out-perform Germany on employment – the United Kingdom and the Nordic Countries – are often considered in the literature on capitalist diversity to differ from Germany in opposite ways. For example, in the dichotomized world of Hall and Soskice (2001) the UK is a paradigm case of a liberal market economy, while the Nordic countries are, like Germany, coordinated market economies. Other observers claim that the Nordics and the UK both have low levels of labor-market regulation, but this only works if certain forms of government regulation are considered: the Nordic countries have more powerful trade unions and legislation governing the work environment than either Germany or the UK. That in post-industrial economies both so-called 'liberal' and 'social demo-cratic' welfare states might have a superior capacity to generate employment than so-called 'corporatist' ones was anticipated some years ago by Esping-An-dersen (1999). In his scheme the UK, the Nordics, and Germany were clear representatives of these respective types. In free-market economies, he argued, there was a large gap between wealthy and poor populations, enabling the former to employ the latter at low wages and with low or nonexistent non-wage costs in low-productivity service jobs. Also, generous welfare states produced a large number of jobs in public services, many of which also existed at low-skilled levels. These two contrasting kinds of economy both developed a capacity to provide low-productivity jobs in services to replace those that had existed in Fordist manufacturing. Ebbinghaus (2000) reached a similar conclusion about these three country types following an examination of a different policy area: early retirement.
Competitive Solidarity: Rethinking the "European Social Model"
An irreversibly more competitive economy forces a rethinking of European concepts of social solidarity, away from redistribution to policies enabling individuals, regions and countries to participate successfully in an international market. Institutionally this is reflected in the continuing national fragmentation of European social policy, and in the absence of centralized social protection at European level. Politically promoted sectoral specialization, potentially accompanied by extensive infrastructural investment, is to offer territorial communities shelter against head-to-head, cut-throat competition while, hopefully, providing for internal equality as well as external competitiveness, and indeed for internally equally distributed external competitiveness. Especially suited for this strategy, which both reacts to and reinforces the absence of centralized political capacity in Europe and beyond, seem to be small and potentially homogeneous political entities.
Investigations of dielectric gratings using electrodynamic models based on volume integral equations
Eigenmodes of planar and cylindrical dielectric gratings (DGs) and electromagnetic wave scattering from multiplayer DGs are investigated. The DG characteristics are calculated using numerical-analytical solution of integral equations (IEs).