How do we measure national progress towards carbon neutrality, holistic sustainable development, and building a green, innovative and competitive economy? A new policy brief outlines the performance and ranking of all EU Member States.
How can governments and other stakeholders put together a systems approach for social protection policies? A new book chapter considers the importance of various fields including taxation, humanitarian aid and livelihood approaches.
These are just two questions tackled by our researchers in September 2021 — in three book chapters, two reports and two working papers, among many others. Click here for the full list of our most recent publications.
Reports
‘Final report on the results of the Co-Val survey‘ presents the final results of two surveys sent to public sector managers at municipalities and national government organisations in France, Hungary, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK and to NGO managers in the same countries as part of the Co-Val Horizon 2020 project. Public sector transformation requires thinking of inclusive ways of citizen engagement in the creation of public value. The traditional view of top-down public administrations, in which citizens can only passively absorb supply-led services, is no longer appropriate. There is a need for a demand-driven design of public services that incorporates the opportunities provided by new technologies to allow the effective engagement of citizens and organizations “to unlock social assets”. By Prof. Anthony Arundel and Nordine Es-Sadki.
‘Networking and alliance building toolkit for diaspora organizations‘, ‘Community outreach toolkit for diaspora organizations‘ and ‘Fundraising toolkit for diaspora organizations‘ form part of the toolkit series commissioned by the Danish Refugee Council’s Diaspora Programme as part of its Diaspora Dialogue in Europe programming. The Diaspora Programme is implemented by DRC’s Civil Society Engagement Unit. DRC engages civil society actors rooted in and/or with direct ties to the Global South, and therefore considers diaspora transnational civil society actors an integral part of the civil society they work with. By Eleni Diker and Dr. Nora Ragab.
Journal articles
‘R&D-based economic growth in a supermultiplier model‘ investigates how economic growth in a demand-driven economy with semi-endogenous productivity growth can be compatible with a stable employment path. The model uses a Sraffian supermultiplier (SSM), and the authors endogenise the growth rate of autonomous demand, and semi-endogenise productivity growth. The basic model has a steady state that is consistent with a stable employment rate, and in which the growth rate is determined by R&D expenditures. Consumption smoothing (between periods of high and low employment) by workers is the mechanism that ensures that demand keeps up with productivity growth and that the growing economy is stable. The study also introduces a version of the model where the burden for stabilisation falls upon government fiscal policy. This also yields a stable growth path, although the parameter restrictions for stability are more demanding in this case. By Dr. Önder Nomaler, Dr. Danilo Spinola and Prof. Bart Verspagen.
‘The influence of regional supply, demand and competition factors on the knowledge transfer outcomes of universities‘ examines the influence of the employment share in knowledge-intensive services (KIS), location in a metropolitan region, and competition from other universities and research institutes in the same region on three measures of university knowledge transfer outcomes: the number of research agreements, licensing, and the number of start-ups. The results show that the KIS employment share has a positive correlation with the number of start-ups, while the location in a metropolitan region is positively correlated with the number of research agreements. By Nordine Es-Sadki and Prof. Anthony Arundel.
Book chapters
‘Refugees and social protection‘ provides an overview of the instruments, actors and design features of social protection systems, as well as their application and impacts in practice. It centres around system building globally, a theme that has gained political importance yet has received relatively little attention in academia. Combining academic discussion with cases from the Global South and North, this book chapter offers practical recommendations on how greater harmonisation across social protection policies, programmes and delivery mechanisms can be achieved. It also highlights the importance of linkages to other policy fields and issues such as taxation, humanitarian aid and livelihood approaches. Overall, the chapters argue that a systems approach is needed to respond to the individual needs of different groups in society and to face future challenges from demographic change, globalisation, automation, climate change and pandemics. By PhD candidate Tamara A. Kool and Dr. Zina Nimeh.
‘Issues, interventions and innovations in the cement industry: a comparative trajectory analysis of eco-cement transitions in the Netherlands, China, and Japan‘ compares and contrasts the co-evolutionary trajectories of eco-cement technology and policy in three contries. We reveal that the transition processes away from Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) to eco-cement follow different conjunctural causation patterns and temporalities due to “multiple stream determinants” emanating from varying degrees of (i) intervention capacities and capabilities of actors in politico-administrative and sociocultural domains, (ii) socio-technical alignment of the policy stream to techno-economic and scientific possibilities, and (iii) the nature of market demand with regard to both traditional and alternative cements. A common target in each context is to reduce the contribution of this basic industry in overall carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, with circular economy policies playing a significantly increasing role in each trajectory. By Dr. Serdar Turkeli, Prof. René Kemp et al.
‘Toward a comprehensive set of metrics for knowledge transfer‘ is a book chapter in ‘Harnessing public research for innovation in the 21st century: An international assessment of knowledge transfer policies’. It recommends collecting metrics for other formal channels (collaboration, contracts, consultancy, etc.) from universities and public research institutes (for instance, by surveying knowledge transfer policies) and metrics for informal knowledge transfer methods from surveys of academics and firms. Such surveys as these can also collect useful data on the goals of academics and firms in participating in knowledge transfer and the barriers that they face. Surveys of firms in middle-income countries should also include metrics to identify differences in the use of and need for knowledge transfer by firm capabilities and the types of financial incentive that they receive from the government, such as vouchers. Another feature of a comprehensive set of metrics is the need to collect institutional data on policies and practices for use in policy evaluation and monitoring. By Prof. Anthony Arundel and Nordine Es-Sadki.
Working papers
‘Economic development, weather shocks and child marriage in South Asia: A machine learning approach‘ explores region-level indicators to predict the persistence of child marriage in four countries in South Asia, namely Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan. The study applies machine learning techniques to child marriage data and develops a prediction model that relies largely on regional and local inputs such as droughts, floods, population growth and nightlight data to model the incidence of child marriages. The authors find that their gradient boosting model is able to identify a large proportion of the true child marriage cases and correctly classifies 78% of the true marriage cases, with higher accuracy in Bangladesh (90% of the cases) and lower accuracy in Nepal (71% of cases). By Dr. Stephan Dietrich, Dr. Aline Meysonnat, Dr. Victor Cebotari and Prof. Franziska Gassmann.
‘Longing for which home: Evidence from global aspirations to stay, return or migrate onwards‘ models the aspirations or stated preferences of immigrants across 138 countries worldwide. The analysis reveals selection in characteristics, a strong role for soft factors like social ties and sociocultural integration, and a faint role for economic factors. Changes in circumstances in the home and host countries are also important determinants of aspirations. Results differ by the host countries’ level of economic development. By Prof. Amelie Constant et al.
Policy brief
‘EU Eco-Innovation Index 2021′ monitors European progress towards carbon neutrality, holistic sustainable development, and building a green, innovative and competitive economy. This policy brief outlines the performance and ranking of EU Member States, measuring performance for the reference year 2020 and the trend of this index and its indicators over the last 10 years (2012-2021). To better understand the coherence between European initiatives, the policy brief provides a comparison between the European-Innovation Scoreboard and the Eco-Innovation Index. Lastly, it identifies European policies and initiatives that are expected to be a driving force in enhancing eco-innovation in the EU By Nordine Es-Sadki et al.
PhD defence
‘Markets and human behavior: Evidence from artefactual field experiments‘ investigates whether and how markets shape human behaviour. The dissertation consists of three self-contained but interrelated essays. The first essay investigates whether markets nurture or erode socially responsible behaviour, the role regulation mechanisms and culture play in promoting social responsibility in markets, and the sequels of eroding socially responsible behaviour. The second essay investigates whether the introduction of weather index insurance (WII) crowds in or crowds out social capital and the underlying mechanisms through which WII may crowd in or crowd out social capital. The third essay examines the impact of exposure to markets on investment decisions (adoption of high-risk high-return agricultural technologies). The findings show that markets have both intended and unintended effects on human behaviour. The dissertation highlights the policy options on how markets could bring about the desired behavioural changes to improve human well-being. By Dr. Halefom Nigus.
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