European Cohesion Policy impact on development and convergence: a local empirical analysis in Portugal between 2000 and 2014

Substantial European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) monies have been directed at regional economic and social development in Portugal in which Portuguese local government plays a vital role. Given the magnitude of funding, an important question turns on the effect of the ESIF on overall local authority performance. This paper focuses on the impact of the ESIF on Portuguese municipality performance and development. In particular, it investigates whether the ESIF improved the performance of Portuguese local government and which factors best explain its effect on municipality development. The analysis considers all 308 Portuguese local authorities for the period 2000–2014. Various policy implications flowing from the empirical results of this analysis are explored.     

Norse Animal Husbandry in Liminal Environments: Stable Isotope Evidence from the Scottish North Atlantic Islands

ABSTRACT

This paper employs δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N analysis of bone collagen to explore animal management at large Norse settlement sites in the liminal environments of the Scottish North Atlantic Islands. The Norse period was a time of social, cultural and economic change; the need to feed an expanding population and the demand for trade meant that domestic stock were a crucial resource. Our results indicate that rearing animals in these challenging insular environments required careful management. At all sites, the diet and movement of domestic cattle and sheep were highly similar and carefully controlled and, despite many of the analysed settlements lying close to the coast, there was no use of shorefront grazing or fodder resources. In contrast, pig rearing strategies varied across the island groups. In the Western Isles pig diets were diverse, indicative of household or ad hoc management, whilst on Orkney all pigs consumed a more restricted diet based primarily on terrestrial protein. A comparison of red deer with domestic stock on the Western Isles indicates that both groups were exploiting similar grazing niches.     

Australia’s relations with the European Community in a historical perspective: an elusive partnership

ABSTRACT

In 2015, Australia and the European Union successfully negotiated a Framework Agreement. This agreement is an essential step in establishing a stronger Australia–European Union partnership and achieving closer bilateral cooperation. For years, negotiating such an agreement had proved impossible. In the 1970s, successive Australian governments showed interest in enhanced collaboration with the European Community, but the political climate for closer relations was far from encouraging. This article explains why this was the case. In doing so, it also explores how the Whitlam and Fraser governments envisaged, framed and developed Australia’s ties with the European Community in the 1970s, and asks whether a more positive approach on their part could have led to a stronger relationship. Based on recently declassified government files, this article shows that although both Whitlam and Fraser fully grasped the importance of the European Community as an emerging international actor and were willing to deepen Australia’s ties with it, significant constraints existed against enhanced bilateral cooperation. With the Common Agricultural Policy still a considerable challenge to Australian economic interests and with the European Community focused mainly on the management of its internal market, broader political considerations were inevitably relegated to the margins of Australia–European Community consultations.     

Drivers and difficulties in the economic relationship between Australia and the European Union: from conflict to cooperation

ABSTRACT

Economic relations between Australia and the European Union (EU) have always been strong, but they have not always been easy. They have been difficult for Australia because it associated the EU with the loss of the UK preferential export market on its entry into the then European Economic Community. And because Australia associated the EU with the original Common Agricultural Policy, which combined subsidies for agricultural production and high agricultural tariffs to make Australian agricultural exports not competitive. They have been difficult for the EU also. Australia developed a biosecurity system to protect its agricultural sector: quarantine requirements and food safety standards made the importation of EU plant and animal products too costly. Yet Australia and the EU need each other. The EU, which is Australia’s largest services trade and investment partner, supplies the business services that drive a knowledge economy and provides the credit to finance economic development. Correspondingly, the EU needs Australia both as a commercial base in Asia and as a reliable energy supplier. This article analyses the drivers and difficulties in the economic relationship between Australia and the EU as they start negotiations for a free trade agreement.     

The business case for a free trade agreement between the European Union and Australia

ABSTRACT

The free trade agreement (FTA) between Australia and the European Union holds the promise of strengthened political collaboration and increasing economic integration. Both Australia and the European Union note increasing bilateral trade and investment. Oftentimes, data does not take current trends in global-value-chain participation for intermediary goods and services movements into account. Behind this sit the cross-border strategies and activities of business entities, whether multinationals or large, small or medium-sized enterprises. This article provides an in-depth investigation of the premise stemming from an FTA for Australian business. What advantages can politics hope to support through a business perspective? What is the global-value-chain part of the story, and what are the business challenges ahead? How can economic policy help shape this FTA to foster a productive bilateral business environment in a geopolitical and geoeconomic context in which regionalisation has taken on new momentum? Specific focus is given to the analysis of the higher education sector and to agriculture. These are two of the leading sectors in this FTA debate. Generating business value means setting negotiation agendas to target tariff and non-tariff barriers to counterbalance ambiguity in the conditions that shape the global business environment.     

Assessing Australia’s options in the context of Brexit: engaging with the UK and the European Union

ABSTRACT

The Brexit vote will fundamentally transform the European Union (EU) and will change how the UK relates to Europe and the rest of the world. What are the implications for Australia at this critical juncture? The UK has been a major player in the Australia–EU relationship, and Australia will now need to recalibrate its approach to both the UK and the EU across a range of policy areas. This article examines the future of Australia–UK and Australia–EU relations in the wake of Brexit, and assesses Australia’s options going forward. The authors advance three considerations. Firstly, Australia’s national interests are best served by adopting a pragmatic rather than nostalgic approach towards future relations with the UK and the EU. Secondly, Australia should avoid pursuing one relationship at the expense of the other and creating a zero-sum dynamic. Finally, Australia’s future strategy must consider broader global developments, such as events within its own region and the US presidency.     

Woman's Work in the Service of Empire: Lady Margaret Field (1905–94) from School Teacher to Governor's Wife

The presence of single and also of married British women in overseas colonies, especially those employed by or married to men in the Colonial Service in the later colonial period, has been the subject of scholarly enquiry. Their lives, roles and values and their distinctive contribution, if any, to the development of empire and of its ending have been debated. Their gendered roles were usually subordinate in a masculine culture of empire, and especially as wives they are commonly regarded as marginalised. The archived records left by Lady Margaret Field reveal her commitment as a single woman to a colonial mission and her sense of achievement as a school teacher and educational administrator, while also acknowledging the independence and career satisfactions she subsequently lost when she married a senior Colonial Service officer who rose to be a governor. But it is also apparent that, though incorporated and subordinate as a governor's wife to her husband's career, she was not marginalised to a separate sphere. As is evident from this case study, governors’ wives had important and demanding political duties, and such responsibilities need to be acknowledged.     

The Jaws Effect: How movie narratives are used to influence policy responses to shark bites in Western Australia

This article examines the way political actors use film narratives to influence policymaking following shark bites. To analyse these relationships I propose the concept of the Jaws Effect, where film-based historical analogies are used as a political device to frame real-life events in ways that make the events governable and prejudice certain policy options. Three elements of the Jaws Effect are reviewed including the intentionality of the shark, perception that these events are fatal and the belief that ‘the shark’ must be killed. These elements are applied to a case study of policy responses to shark bite episodes in Western Australia in 2000, 2003, 2011 and 2014. The reasons why this political device may not always work are also suggested.

本文研究了政治主体以什么方式使用电影叙事来影响鲨鱼咬人之后的政策制定。笔者提出“《大白鲨》效应”的概念,也就是以取自电影的历史类比为政治手段来言说现实生活中的事件,让事件根据言说者的需要,不利于某些政策选择。本文分析了《大白鲨》效应的三要素：鲨鱼的目的性;现实生活的事件性命攸关;鲨鱼必须被杀死。笔者将三要素用于研究2000、2003、2011和2014年西澳大利亚鲨鱼要人事件之后的政策反应。文章也探讨了为什么这种政治手法并不总能凑效。     

Middle Bronze Age Arsenical Copper Alloys in Southern Portugal

In the Iberian Peninsula, the copper metallurgy from the Chalcolithic to the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) was mostly characterized by low arsenic contents. A collection of 53 MBA artefacts from southern Portugal was analysed by micro‐EDXRF, optical microscopy, SEM–EDS and Vickers to investigate the metal composition and manufacture. No technological distinction was found between artefacts from domestic and funerary contexts, which were radiocarbon‐dated to 2000–1500 cal bc . The arsenic contents of almost 100 MBA artefacts from this region, including the above‐mentioned set, have a Gaussian distribution with a high average (3.9 wt% As). Possible explanations are discussed for this distinctive metallurgy at the south‐western end of the Iberian Peninsula.     

Contemporary Irish theatre,the new Playboy controversy,and the economic crisis

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the economic crisis on contemporary Irish theatre. More specifically, I contend that the legal controversy surrounding Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s second production of Playboy of the Western World: A New Version in 2008 provides a case study of how professional theatre productions that dramatised stories of immigrant empowerment during the Irish economic boom were profoundly inhibited by the bust that followed. Their collaborative version of the new Playboy was widely regarded as Ireland’s most successful intercultural play and a commercial success when it was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in 2007. The subsequent breakdown in their relationship and ensuing legal dispute is more symptomatic of Celtic Tiger Ireland in economic collapse, I suggest, than the content of the play itself, or most other productions mounted in the period. I argue that this dispute did not simply reflect but also reinforced the social effects of the economic crisis, through its prolonged litigation, enormous expense, and especially the missed opportunity that it represented to position the multicultural and migrant themed Playboy within the Irish theatrical mainstream. More broadly, I suggest that the economic crisis has been marked by the disappearance of immigrants from the professional Irish stage, a void which was only partially filled by community theatre productions. A case in point is Adigun and Arambe’s most recent adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road in The Paddies of Parnell Street (2013), a play which I positively appraise as an example of successful “intercultural re-appropriation”.