Globalisation has had undesirable effects on the labour standards embedded in the products we consume. This paper proposes an ex-ante evaluation of supply chain due diligence regulations, such as the EU Corporate Sustainable Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). We construct a full-scale network model derived from structural business statistics of 30 million EU firms to quantify the likelihood of links to firms potentially involved in human rights abuses in the European supply chain. The 900 million supply links of these firms are modelled in a way that is consistent with multiregional input-output data, EU import data, and stylized facts of firm-level production networks. We find that this network exhibits a small world effect with three degrees of separation, meaning that most firms are no more than three steps away from each other in the network. Consequently, we find that about 8.5 percent of EU companies are at risk of having child or forced labour in the first tier of their supply chains, about 82.4 percent are likely to have such offenders at the second tier and more than 99.1 percent have such offenders at the third tier. We also profile companies by country, sector, and size for the likelihood of having human rights violations or child and forced labour violations at a given tier in their supply chain, revealing considerable heterogeneity across EU companies. Our results show that supply chain due diligence regulations that focus on monitoring individual buyer-supplier links, as currently proposed in the CSDDD, are likely to be ineffective due to a high degree of redundancy and the fact that individual company value chains cannot be properly isolated from the global supply network. Rather, to maximise cost-effectiveness without compromising due diligence coverage, we suggest that regulations should focus on monitoring individual suppliers.

Leading theories suggest that amongst continuing exporters, lower variable trade costs should boost exports of smaller firms by the same or greater percentage rate than larger firms. However, investigating the impact of the deep EU-South Korea FTA with French customs data, we find robust evidence to the contrary. Applying a triple-difference framework, we report that the FTA increased sales in the top quartile of continuous exporters by 71.5 percent points more than in the bottom quartile. More than 90 percent of that growth premium is driven by reductions in NTBs. These findings suggest an additional channel driving the distributional effects of FTAs.

This paper advances a dynamic rationale for competitiveness policy that focuses on an economy's ability to evolve in order to achieve high real incomes along with desired qualitative changes in the socio-economic system. It highlights that the ubiquitous "rationalities of failure", either of markets, governments, or systems, are rooted in a peculiar habit of accepting hypothetical perfect states as normative benchmarks. In contrast, competitiveness policy starts from the objectives that the system wants to achieve. By combining the structuralist ontology of the micro, meso and macro levels of development with the basic system functions of evolutionary change, a general typology is developed that differentiates, organizes, and integrates various economic policies according to their respective contributions to the evolvability of the system. Among other advantages, the proposed concept of competitiveness policy allows (i) to replace the negative "logic of failure" with the active pursuit of dynamic development goals, (ii) to break the ideologically afflicted dichotomy between "vertical" and "horizontal" policies and (iii) to better align the theoretical rationale with the actual perception of the societal purpose of public interventions by most policy agents.

We present a novel approach to analyze the effects of EU cohesion policy on local economic activity. For all municipalities in the border area of the Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland, we collect project-level data on EU funding in the period between 2007 and 2013. Using night light emission data as a proxy for economic development, we show that receiving a higher amount of EU funding is associated with increased economic activity at the municipal level. Our paper demonstrates that remote sensing data can provide an effective way to model local economic development also in Europe, where comprehensive cross-border data are not available at such a spatially granular level.

Anhand der vergangenen Entwicklung wird gezeigt, dass sich im Lauf der Zeit die Schwerpunkte und Fragestellungen der Pensionspolitik verändert haben. Im Hinblick auf die anhaltende Diskussion zur Sicherung der Finanzierung der Alterssicherung wird eine Adaptierung der Finanzierungsstruktur der Alterssicherung im Sinne des Leistungsfähigkeitsprinzips an die Gegebenheiten des Produktions- und Wirtschaftssystems des 21. Jahrhunderts und der Vermögensökonomie zur Diskussion gestellt.

Die Stimmung in der deutschen Wirtschaft hat sich in den vergangenen Monaten spürbar eingetrübt. Nahezu kein Wirtschaftsbereich blieb davon verschont. Anders als noch im Sommer erwartet, dürfte daher die Erholung in der zweiten Jahreshälfte ausbleiben und sich die konjunkturelle Abkühlung fortsetzen. Im laufenden Quartal dürfte die Wirtschaftsleistung um 0,2% im Vergleich zum Vorquartal sinken. Erst gegen Jahresende ist wieder mit einem leichten Anstieg um 0,3% zu rechnen, bevor dann im kommenden Jahr gesamtwirtschaftlich eine Erholung einsetzt. Insgesamt wird das preisbereinigte Bruttoinlandsprodukt in diesem Jahr um 0,4% im Vergleich zum Vorjahr zurückgehen. In den kommenden beiden Jahren wird die Wirtschaftsleistung dann um 1,4% und 1,2% zulegen. Die konjunkturelle Schwäche wird den Beschäftigungsaufbau weitgehend zum Erliegen bringen und die Arbeitslosigkeit zunächst weiter steigen lassen. Die Arbeitslosenquote wird in diesem und im kommenden Jahr mit durchschnittlich 5,6% um 0,3 Prozentpunkte höher liegen als noch im Jahr 2022. Erst im Jahr 2025 dürfte die Quote wieder auf 5,3% zurückgehen. Die Inflationsrate wird weiter zurückgehen von durchschnittlich 6,0% in diesem Jahr auf 2,6% im kommenden und 1,9% im übernächsten Jahr.

In view of the challenges posed by climate change and the increasingly ambitious climate targets around the world, the search for effective climate policy instruments is gaining momentum. Carbon pricing, for example, in the form of a carbon tax, and its effects are therefore attracting increasing attention in academic as well as policy discussions. We review the empirical effects of carbon taxes with regard to several impact dimensions commonly studied in the literature: environmental effectiveness, macroeconomic effects, impacts on competitiveness and innovation, distributional implications, and public acceptance. An increasing body of empirical studies shows that carbon taxes can effectively reduce carbon emissions or at least dampen their growth while not negatively affecting economic growth, employment, and competitiveness. The existing empirical evidence suggests that the distributional impact of carbon taxes depends on the type of energy use and the indicators to capture distributional effects, as well as on household characteristics. Lump-sum transfers are shown to be better suited to mitigate regressive effects for lower incomes, while higher incomes benefit more from a reduction of labour taxes. Public acceptance of carbon taxes can be increased by providing public information, avoiding negative distributional effects, and channelling part of the revenues into "environmental projects".

Dieser Beitrag untersucht, ob das österreichische System der Lohnfindung, trotz enormer Veränderungen der ökonomischen Rahmenbedingungen in den letzten Jahrzehnten, noch einer Lohnkoordination durch den Leitabschluss des Metallersektors folgt. Anhand einer quantitativen ökonometrischen Untersuchung auf Basis detaillierter Tariflohndaten zeigt sich, dass der Prozess der Lohnfindung immer noch am besten durch die Lohnführerschaft des Metallersektors erklärt werden kann. Zudem hat sich die Lohnkoordinationsfunktion des Metallerabschlusses wohl durch eine zunehmende Konzentration von Kollektivvertragsabschlüssen, die im Jänner beginnen, verstärkt. Ein kürzerer zeitlicher Abstand zum Abschluss des Metallersektors könnte dafür sorgen, dass die Signalwirkung des Leitabschlusses steigt und die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung, die bei einem zeitlich größeren Abstand wichtiger wird, weniger Wirkung entfaltet.