The article analyses Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the EU with a view to assess the importance of the rotating Presidency. It concentrates on the questions of leadership in the EU. By looking into four challenges facing Slovenian Presidency: the third cycle of the Lisbon strategy, third package for the market for gas and electricity, deepening in the field of financial regulation and engagement in Western Balkan, the article points to the elements suggesting more permanent leadership structures (such as those introduced by the Lisbon Treaty) to ensure a more coherent and continuous development of the EU.
COBISS.SI-ID: 28563805
This paper deals with the translation of terminology used in Slovene diplomatic language, stressing the importance of working with experts in the fields of diplomacy and translation. The study is based on an analysis of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961 (placed in effect in 1964), its versions in three of the official languages of the UN (English, French, and Russian), the two (unofficial) Slovene translations, and the German translation. The Slovene translations are also compared with the Serbo-Croatian translation, which is the only official translation of the Convention ratified by the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1964.
COBISS.SI-ID: 46985058
This paper presents a comparative study of the importance of direct technology transfer and spillovers through FDI on a set of 10 transition countries, using a common methodology and appropriate methods to account for selection and simultaneity correction. This paper considers by far the largest firm level dataset (more than 90,000 firms) used by any study on the spillover effects of FDI. The main novelty of the paper is the explicit control for various sources of firm heterogeneity when accounting for different effects of FDI on firm performance. This work shows that the heterogeneity of firms in terms of absorptive capacity, size, productivity and technology levels affect the results. Controlling for these variables leads to some interesting results, which contrast with the previous empirical work in the field. We find that horizontal spillovers have become increasingly important over the last decade, and they may even become more important than vertical spillovers. Positive horizontal spillovers are equally distributed across size classes of firms, while negative horizontal spillovers seem to be more likely to accrue to smaller firms. Moreover, positive horizontal spillovers seem more likely to be present in medium or high productivity firms with higher absorptive capacities, while negative horizontal spillovers are more likely to affect low to medium productivity firms. These findings suggest that both direct effects from foreign ownership as well as the spillovers from foreign firms substantially depend on the absorptive capacity and productivity level of individual firms. In addition, these results show that foreign presence may also affect smaller firms to a larger extent than larger firms, but this impact may be in either direction.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1675662
In this paper, we emphasize the role of institutions as the underlying basis for economic and social activity. We describe and compare different institutional classification systems, which is rarely done in the literature, and show how to empirically operationalize institutional concepts. More than 30 established institutional indicators can be clustered into three homogeneous groups of formal institutions: legal, political and economic, which capture to a large extent the complete formal institutional environment of a country. We compute the latent quality of legal, political and economic institutions for every country in the world and for every year. On this basis,we propose a legal, political and economic World Institutional Quality Ranking, through which we can follow whether a country is improving or worsening its relative institutional environment. The calculated latent institutional quality measures can be especially useful in further panel data applications and add to the usual practice of using simply one or another index of institutional quality to capture the institutional environment. We make the Institutional Quality Dataset, covering up to 197 countries and territories from 1990 to 2010, freely available online.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32093277
This paper complements a large body of literature on structural change and underlying factors for the expansion of services. The main aim is to explore the determinants of the employment growth in the enlarged European Union from the perspective of various service groups, public, private and mixed services,and to identify which factors played the most significant role in theperiod 1995-2007. The roles played by standard determinants, the state, social and demographic changes, institutional framework of labour markets and membership to old EU15 considerably differ across service groups
COBISS.SI-ID: 31223133