A detailed review of the education sector in Australia as in the data provided by the 2006 edition of the OECD's annual publication, 'Education at a Glance' is presented. While the data has shown that in almost all OECD countries educational attainment levels are on the rise, with countries showing impressive gains in university qualifications, it also reveals that a large of share of young people still do not complete secondary school, which remains a baseline for successful entry into the labour market.

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Education at a Glance

Buying time: The delayed crisis of democratic capitalism

Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism

opment, which includes social capital as one of its explanatory factors. In the absence of this analysis, we do not know if social capital is really driving political development or some other factor, such as economic development. Overall, this is a bold and ambitious book which examines participation across the world with a big theoretical canvas and a broad range of data. However, a more judicious analysis of the data and a greater recognition of the limitations of the sources would have made it a better book.

The Futures of European Capitalism

Global Capital, Political Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States

Until the mid 1990s, the notion of Social Europe was primarily associated with the introduction of binding supranational rules aimed at safeguarding and possibly upgrading the social protection systems of the Member States. The political and institutional obstacles to such kind of rules were well known in practice and well understood in theory - especially in the wake of the negative vs. positive integration debate. But 'hard law' seemed to be the only effective strategy of action, given the low impact of weaker institutional tools such as recommendations, on the one hand, and the growing incentives for 'social dumping' generated by the completion of the internal market, on the other hand. The second half of the 1990s witnessed a gradual change of climate and perspective. Binding legislation continued to be seen as a very important ingredient of Europe's social dimension: indeed the debate on fundamental rights and on a possible fully-fledged EU constitution shifted the front of legal ambitions even further. But at the same time another strategy of policy intervention started to be considered and experimented with, resting on a complex mix of soft institutional ingredients, endowed with a strong potential of conditioning the direction of change at the national level. Originally applied in the area of employment, this new approach was then extended to other policy sectors - and most notably, policies to combat social exclusion - under the name of 'open method of coordination' (OMC), coined during the Portuguese Presidency in 2000. The main institutional ingredients of the OMC are common guidelines, national action plans, peer reviews, joint evaluation reports and recommendations. None of such instruments has a binding character, underpinned by legal enforcement powers. Moreover, while providing policy actors with a relatively clear agenda, the mix of these ingredients leaves ample room

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0952872002012003396

Open coordination against poverty: the new EU `social inclusion process'

This article shows the relevance of implicit conditionality in the eurozone crisis, that is, conditionality based on an implicit understanding of the stakes and sanctions involved, underlain by some measure of power asymmetry. The concept of implicit conditionality is applied to the reconstruction of Italy’s sovereign debt crisis, and the structural – pension and labour market – reforms introduced by the Monti government, following requests from the European Union (EU). Actual or potential access to EU financial support – carried out through purchase of Italy’s bonds to alleviate market tensions on its debt – was the carrot. The threat of having to enter formalized, explicit conditional lending programmes with the International Monetary Fund in order to avoid default was the stick. Market discipline was the operating mechanism that made implicit conditionality effective, and the role of monitoring by the EU was pervasive. Developments described in this article seem to support a revitalization of the fusion hypothesis between EU and member states – at least in the eurozone.

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Conditionality by other means: EU involvement in Italy's structural reforms in the sovereign debt crisis

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Flex-insecurity. Perché in Italia la flessibilità diventa precarietà

In all European countries, emergency policy measures have been introduced in order to counteract the employment consequences of the economic crisis. In the context of variously composed anti-crisis packages, many European countries have used Short-Time Work (STW) schemes, that is measures to subsidize a temporary reduction in working time intended to maintain an employment relationship. This article focuses on the issue of whether the economic crisis has spurred any convergence in the use of STW in three social-insurance countries – Austria, Germany and Italy – or whether policy change has rather occurred in a path-dependent fashion. In order to do so, the article also adopts a systemic approach, focusing on relationships of complementarity or functional substitution and equivalence among the various schemes comprising income maintenance systems to tackle the risks of partial or total unemployment.

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The Economic Crisis as a Trigger of Convergence? Short-time Work in Italy, Germany and Austria

After a decade of inertia, that left it unprepared to withstand the blow of the great recession, the Italian welfare state has witnessed significant changes since 2012. Externally driven consolidat...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13608746.2018.1433478

Stefano Sacchi

Papers

Open coordination against poverty: the new EU `social inclusion process'

Conditionality by other means: EU involvement in Italy's structural reforms in the sovereign debt crisis

Flex-insecurity. Perché in Italia la flessibilità diventa precarietà

The Economic Crisis as a Trigger of Convergence? Short-time Work in Italy, Germany and Austria

The Italian Welfare State in the Crisis: Learning to Adjust?