Competition Policy in Europe – Temporary or Long-Lasting Changes?
During the first phase of the global crisis, the scale and scope of state aid increased at an unprecedented rate all over the world. Although their approval is – uniquely – part of competition policy in the European Union, the Commission and DG Competition did not oppose the unprecedented expansion of state aid. On the contrary, they played an active role in the modification and enforcement of frameworks. The paper analyses how EU regulation, prohibiting state aid for distorting competition, might be compatible with recent developments in this field. It comes to the conclusion that the European Commission proved to be strong enough to keep the regulation of distribution methods under control and to try to enforce the basic principles, but was unable to stem the tide of aid. By doing so, it contributed to the accumulation and growth of state deficits, the repeated destabilisation of financial markets and sovereign debts, and thus to the escalation of the second wave of the financial crisis in Europe in 2011.
The EMU sovereign-debt crisis: Fundamentals, expectations and contagion
We offer a detailed empirical investigation of the European sovereign debt crisis based on the theoretical model by Arghyrou and Tsoukalas (2010). We find evidence of a marked shift in market pricing behaviour from a ‘convergence-trade’ model before August 2007 to one driven by macro-fundamentals and international risk thereafter. The majority of EMU countries have experienced contagion from Greece. There is no evidence of significant speculation effects originating from CDS markets. Finally, the escalation of the Greek debt crisis since November 2009 is confirmed as the result of an unfavourable shift in country specific market expectations. Our findings highlight the necessity of structural, competitiveness-inducing reforms in periphery EMU countries and institutional reforms at the EMU level enhancing intra-EMU economic monitoring and policy co-ordination.
Did the metamorphosis from Export Processing Zones to Special Economic Zones improve the efficiency of trade enclaves in India?
In this paper, the efficiency of seven conventional Special Economic Zones in India is analyzed, by adopting a stochastic production frontier technique, for the period between 1986–1987 and 2007–2008.Results indicate that although the efficiency scores of these enclaves have improved over the years, specifically with the introduction of the SEZ policy (2000–2001), it is far below the threshold level as identified in the literature. Besides, one can also observe a discrepancy emerging between better export earning zones and efficient zones. On the determinants side, policy intervention and large geographical area, accompanied by clustering of units, are found to have impacted the efficiency scores of these enclaves positively.