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The European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) causal effects of a state lending policy
Get PDFWe examine the impact of a major lending programme of the European Investment Bank (EIB) on firm investment. Using a difference-in-differences design applied to a unique dataset of loan recipients, we find that EIB loans led to substantial additional growth in recipients’ fixed assets. This provides the first causal evidence on the additionality of large state investment bank loans made directly to firms. The findings highlight the potential for strategic public lending to advance policy agendas for sustainable economic growth
Judging the blame game: how do citizens react to blame shifting in public service delivery
Get PDFThis article examines blame shifting, where elected officials attempt to deflect blame for negative outcomes onto other actors. While prior research suggests that citizens generally disapprove of this tactic, this study re-evaluates how contextual factors shape these reactions, focusing specifically on cases of public service failure. In many areas of public management, service delivery is delegated or contracted out to public or private organizations, raising the question of whether such institutional arrangements make it easier for politicians to shift blame onto these agents. A survey experiment (n = 955) was conducted in the United Kingdom involving a hypothetical public service failure. Information cues varied the response strategy of local elected officials (shifting blame or accepting responsibility) and the service delivery model (public or private sector; high or low delegation). The results from OLS regression analyses show that participants were generally less approving of blame shifting compared to accepting responsibility. However, approval increased when the organization being blamed was viewed by participants as carrying more blame for failures in service delivery than the official. Although delegation levels did not directly moderate the effect of blame shifting, further logistic regression analysis shows that higher delegation made participants more likely to view the service provider as culpable, which in turn influenced how they reacted to blame shifting tactics. These findings highlight the conditional nature of public reactions to blame avoidance behavior, showing that citizens’ evaluations of tactics like blame shifting depend on their beliefs about who is responsible, which can be shaped by institutional context. The study offers new insights into when blame shifting may appear more credible or justified and underscores the role of context in shaping the effectiveness of political blame avoidance strategies
Power and its discontents: The long road to systemic change in the aid sector
Get PDFPower inequalities between Northern and Southern NGOs have historically plagued development cooperation. A growing momentum towards localisation, locally-led development, and shift the power is indicative of widespread efforts to respond to these inequalities. Drawing upon new survey data, we explore the nature of specific actions taken by a sample of NNGOs and SNGOs to address these power inequalities and analyse the extent to which these equalize power. We find that organisations in our sample are taking important steps toward reconfiguring traditional power dynamics and fostering more collaborative and accountable relationships between Northern and Southern actors. Yet a deeper analysis of these raises questions around whether actions are deep enough to rebalance or upturn unequal relationships and contribute to broader systems change. We find that innovations within the aid system are making incremental improvements without fundamentally shifting where decision-making power and financial power lie. Significant to scholars and practitioners alike, these findings underscore the need for more substantive and systemic changes to achieve genuine equity in development cooperation
Third country bank branches
No full textThis chapter addresses the new CRD VI regime governing third country branches. This regime imposes an authorization requirement and related ongoing obligations on branches of third country undertakings providing specified banking services (in effect, the core banking services of deposit-taking and lending). Relatedly, it prohibits the remote provision of core banking services in the EU by third country undertakings: EU establishment, whether through a branch or subsidiary, is required. A new harmonized regime addressing the internal governance of third country branches will apply as a result. This chapter examines the origins of this internal governance regime, its main features, and the context which has shaped its construction
Risk, reasonableness, and residual harm under the EU AI Act: a conceptual framework for proportional ex-ante controls
Get PDFThe EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) establishes a novel risk-based regulatory model for AI systems, categorising uses into four tiers: unacceptable (prohibited), high-risk (tightly regulated), limited-risk (transparency obligations), and minimal-risk (largely unregulated). This article develops a rigorous conceptual framework to analyse the Act’s logic of risk, reasonableness, and residual harm. It explains how the principles of precaution and proportionality shape the AI Act’s ex ante controls, requiring providers to anticipate reasonably foreseeable misuse and apply measures that reflect the state of the art. 1 We propose criteria for calibrating key requirements (data governance, transparency, human oversight, robustness or cybersecurity) to the severity and uncertainty of risks, drawing on risk-regulation theory (e.g., Baldwin and Black’s responsive regulation and Sunstein’s cost-benefit rationality). The analysis also situates the EU approach within a comparative context, noting alignments and divergences with US and OECD AI frameworks – for example, the EU’s precautionary bans on biometric mass surveillance contrast with the US reliance on voluntary risk management guidelines. Specific high-impact use cases (biometric identification in public spaces, AI in critical infrastructure) illustrate how risk severity triggers stricter controls. The article concludes by discussing policy implications for implementation, including the role of harmonised standards and presumptions of conformity, the interface with parallel cybersecurity regimes (NIS2, DORA) as “risk multipliers,” and the need for further guidance and delegated acts to ensure that the AI Act’s proportional safeguards remain effective in the face of technological change
Do occupational aspirations of children help to explain ethnic differences in labour market outcomes?
Get PDFAcross the UK’s ethnic groups there is substantial variation in labour market outcomes, driven in part by differences in occupational concentration. Yet we lack insight into whether these outcomes may be shaped, in part, by differences in preferences deriving from group-level cultural socialisation. We shed light on this question using the nationally representative Millennium Cohort Study. We study the occupational aspirations of girls and boys prior to school completion, matching these aspirations to job characteristics drawn from the Labour Force Survey across the two dimensions of value and gender-typicality. We estimate growth curve models tracking the value and gender-typicality of the aspired job from early childhood into adolescence, and test how far trajectories are consistent with theoretical expectations about the influence of group-level characteristics. We find that differences between ethnic groups are small; but those that exist do not support the contention that preferences are shaped by cultural socialisation in the ways theorised. Minority girls aspire to higher-paid occupations than their majority counterparts, and this is the case for those both from more and from less traditional and disadvantaged communities. We conclude there is a need to revisit cultural accounts of labour market outcomes among the children of immigrants
International legal responses to ransomware: toward a ban on payments?
Get PDFRansomware has matured into a transnational, profit-driven threat that exploits asymmetries in cyber resilience and legal frameworks. This article evaluates whether moving toward a legal prohibition on ransom payments is a viable and proportionate strategy. Using a comparative analysis of developments between 2023 and 2025 in the United States, United Kingdom, European Union and selected third countries (notably Australia), it maps emerging policy instruments—targeted payment bans, payment-preclearance/approval regimes, mandatory incident and payment reporting, and sanctions-based constraints—and assesses their interaction with existing international law, including the Budapest Convention and the draft UN Cybercrime Convention. The analysis highlights the deterrent rationale of “starving the business model” through reduced payment flows, while scrutinizing material risks: displacement effects across jurisdictions, potential under-reporting, operational harm to essential services, and disproportionate burdens on SMEs. It further addresses human-rights and due-process concerns (necessity, proportionality, narrowly tailored exemptions), conflicts of laws in multinational incidents, and the role of crypto-asset controls and coordinated law-enforcement disruption. The article proposes an incremental, internationally coordinated roadmap: (i) harmonized bans for governments and critical infrastructure; (ii) universal, time-bound reporting of incidents and payments; (iii) strengthened cross-border MLA/extradition and asset-freezing for ransomware proceeds; (iv) victim-support mechanisms (decryption sharing, recovery funding) to avoid perverse incentives; and (v) norms addressing safe havens. The central claim is that a payment ban can be effective only as part of a comprehensive framework that couples legal constraints with resilience, transparency, and multilateral enforcement; under those conditions, a converging international norm of refusing to pay cyber ransoms is both legally tenable and strategically advantageous
Against the planetary: carbon fetishism and the politics of false solutions
Get PDFWhy does climate action so often take socially regressive and ecologically destructive forms? Building on Stuart Hall, we argue that regressive climate change solutions are enabled by an articulation between planetary-scale carbon fetishism and capitalist class interests. We term this global but uneven formation planetary climate politics. Planetary climate politics reduces the climate crisis to atmospheric CO2 management and a corresponding assignment of responsibility across states. This abstract planetary conception of the problem occludes political-economic context at multiple scales and separates climate politics from the politics of any actual social milieu. This leaves even ‘progressive’ climate advocates undiscriminating about possible solutions, enabling alliances with dominant classes around ‘false solutions.’ Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in coastal Bangladesh and the U.S. state of Louisiana, we illuminate the baneful consequences of planetary climate politics at sites of both adaptation and mitigation. More broadly we make the case for critical ethnographies of the climate crisis to challenge planetary carbon fetishism, differentiate emancipatory and regressive pathways of climate action and help the climate movement articulate with struggles for social and environmental justice
What counts as need? A qualitative study exploring perceptions of sexual and reproductive health in humanitarian settings
Get PDFSexual and reproductive health (SRH) is a core component of good health for people living in contexts affected by conflict, displacement or other crises. This paper explores how SRH needs are understood by the international humanitarian community, and the implications for the relative prioritisation of different components of SRH, spanning health-, rights- and justice-based approaches. I draw on feminist theory from situated knowledge and standpoint epistemology which highlights that there are different ways of representing problems. The methodology uses original semi-structured interviews with participants (n = 31) from international organisations, donor and research institutions working on humanitarian SRH. Data analysis was iterative and flexible, using memos, formal coding, and thematic networks. The study's findings suggest that partial evidence, humanitarian norms, and positionalities shape perceptions of SRH needs among the international humanitarian community. This has implications for who and what is visible, resulting in a de facto hierarchy within SRH service delivery in humanitarian settings. The research demonstrates the insights offered by a more critical approach to needs- and evidence-based humanitarian action. This lens is more relevant than ever in the current climate of aid funding cuts. I call for a paradigm shift towards incorporating more comprehensive, longer-term, and minority perspectives in interpreting and prioritising SRH needs that may better acknowledge and respond to the realities of affected people
Assessing the generalizability of client experience measurement tools in low- and middle-income countries: a narrative review
Get PDFINTRODUCTION: The experiences of people who interact with a health system form a key component of overall quality of care in that system. Yet, client experience is rarely reflected in how health systems are designed and assessed. To make meaningful progress on delivering high-quality patient-centered care, health systems actors need valid measures of client experience of care. However, no cross-cutting measure of client experience of care exists at present that could facilitate measurement and benchmarking across multiple health service areas. METHODS: We conducted a phased literature search using multiple scholarly databases to identify peer-reviewed articles detailing the development, validation, or adaptation of measures relating to the concept of client experience in sexual and reproductive health care, HIV, primary care, noncommunicable disease management, and health services management and marketing. Measure domains were thematically analyzed and mapped against domains of an existing client experience of care framework-effective communication, respect and dignity, and emotional support. RESULTS: We identified 73 articles that met inclusion criteria and that recounted the development, validation, or adaptation of 61 different measures of health care quality and responsiveness. Numerous measures exhibited significant overlap with an existing conceptual framework for client experience, but few measures were used across health areas. DISCUSSION: Content of many of the measures identified in this review mapped closely to domains that appear in an existing framework for client experience of care, including effective communication, respect and dignity, and emotional support. These findings support the notion that developing a generalizable measure of client experience of care could be technically feasible