Forces affecting employment dynamics in Groningen; Case study in a lagging rural region in the Netherlands
In this report the focus is on employment dynamics in Drenthe since the beginning of the 1980s. This study is part of an EU wide research project on employment development in leading and lagging rural regions of the EU. Total employment in Drenthe increased by 24,500 jobs or with over 20% in the period 1984-1996. Nearly 40% of employment growth occurred in the community, social and personal services sector, 25% in the trade, restaurant and hotel sector, 14% in the financial services sector, 13% in the construction sector and 12% in the manufacturing sector. A substantial part of employment growth consists of part time jobs. Employment in the agricultural sector declined by over 2,000 jobs in this period. Employment development is the result of many interacting factors. As strengths have been identified the beautiful landscape, which attracts tourists, labourers, entrepreneurs and retirees, the location of the region near the city of Groningen, the strategies of policymakers to create favourable preconditions for firm settlement, like zones of economic activities, low land prices and investment subsidies. Weak points in the employment situation are the peripheral location of Drenthe relatively to main economic centres, the cautious and risk averting attitude of many entrepreneurs and the relatively thinness of the economic structure. Opportunities for further employment growth are the congestion in the Randstad, improvements in infrastructure like the doubling of the N37 and the development of tourism. Threats are competitiveness with low wage countries and changes in EU agricultural and structural policies.
Rural employment dynamics in the EU Key findings for policy consideration emerging from the RUREMPLO project
The RUREMPLO team: Jaap H. Post and Ida J. Terluin (coordination), Agricultural Economics Research Institute LEI-DLO, The Netherlands; Heino von Meyer, Pro Rural Europe, FR Germany; Franco Sotte and Roberto Esposti, Università Degli Studi di Ancona, Italy; Sophia Efstratoglou and Angelos Efstratoglou, Agricultural University of Athens, Greece; Jacques Blanchet, Jean Pierre Bertrand, Bernard Roux and Åsa Sjöström, INRA Grignon, and Jean-Claude Bontron, SEGESA, France; Jordi Rosell and Lourdes Viladomiu, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain; Bruno Henry de Frahan, Pierre Dupraz and Béatrice Van Haeperen, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium; Tuomas Kuhmonen, Fin-Auguuri Oy (Ltd), Finland; Markus F. Hofreither and Franz Weiss, Institut für Wirtschaft, Politik und Recht, Austria.
Strategy and Manipulation in Medieval Elections
There are many goals in developing electoral protocols, including a desire for a system which is transparent, in that it is clear what the rule or procedure to follow is; nonmanipulable, in that it is not in a person’s best interest to misrepresent their preferences; honest, in the sense that it elects the ‘right’ candidate; and not open to strategizing, i.e., bribery or collusion. However, these desiderata are in tension with each other: Often, transparent electoral procedures are the least strategy resistant, and many honest procedures encourage manipulation. Thus a balance between these different goals must be sought. In modern times, since the seminal result on vote manipulation, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [5, 6], much attention has been devoted to developing voting rules where manipulation is never in the best interest of the voters [4] or which are computationally too complex for the average bounded agent to be able to manipulate [1]. This focus on computational aspects of electoral methods is one of the hallmarks of modern studies on voting. But pursuit of these goals is not restricted to modern times: Those participating in elections in the Middle Ages also sought transparency, non-manipulability, honesty, and strategyproofness in so far as these properties can be consistently expressed in a single procedure. However, given the lack of computational sophistication in the Middle Ages, alternate approaches were needed in order to promote honesty, discourage strategizing, etc. These approaches can be classified as either external (constraints introduced outside of the electoral procedure, such as incentives for coming to consensus quickly) or internal (constraints introduced within the electoral procedure, such as voting rules which cannot be manipulated without adverse effects, or which are too difficult for the average bounded agent to manipulate). Surveying examples of both approaches in the context of medieval ecclesiastical and secular elections provides an interesting comparison to modern electoral procedures. Elections in the Middle Ages were used for the same reasons that they are today: To select suitable candidate(s) for a particular office, duty, or obligation. However, it is important to note that the term electio was used in the Middle Ages in a broader sense than our modern ‘election’. Its primary sense was ‘selection’ or ‘choice’, and only secondarily ‘election’ in the modern sense. Thus, many records which purportedly discuss elections are not discussing elections of the type which interests us. We can identify four categories of medieval electoral processes: (1) Election by an external authority having no direct interest in the election; (2) Indirect election, where electors name other electors who then select or elect the officials; (3) Election by lot; and (4) Election by ballot. Elections of the first and third types are generally computationally uninteresting; the first type corresponds to dictatorial voting rules, and the third type collapses to probability theory. In general, interesting voting methods are found only in the fourth type, election by ballot, though they can also occur in indirect election.