Sustaining the unsustainable? The political sustainability of pensions in Finland and the Netherlands

What makes a pension scheme sustainable? Most answers to this question have revolved around expert assessments of pension schemes’ affordability or adequacy. This study shifts focus from the financial or social sustainability of pension scheme designs to their political sustainability. Political sustainability refers to policymakers’ ability and willingness to sustain pension schemes in the face of perceived challenges. We seek to fill a key research gap concerning the political sustainability of pensions by highlighting the processes of parametric adjustment through which pension schemes are sustained. We show how capital, labour and state actors have been able to actively sustain collective defined benefit (DB) pension schemes in two coordinated market economies, Finland and the Netherlands. The two countries have managed to sustain their DB pensions for relatively long periods of time despite facing the same sustainability challenges that have motivated paradigmatic shifts in other pension systems. We find that sustaining has been successful thanks to a governance culture in which policymakers have been willing to keep all pension scheme parameters open for negotiation and an institutional context that made policymakers able to turn parametric pension reforms into power resources for further reforms. Our findings also explain recent changes in the Netherlands, which moved the Dutch system towards collective defined contribution pensions.

Management of Slum Settlements based on Sustainable Development in the Deli Watershed of Medan City

The population in urban areas continues to increase while the land owned is limited which results in slum settlements in urban areas. Slum settlements in Medan City often appear in areas where buildings should not be allowed, such as in watersheds. Deli River as a large river that divides Medan City, there are still many slum settlements in the watershed. Management of slum settlements based on sustainable development is needed to provide a long-term impact, especially for the preservation and restoration of the function of the Deli River. This study aims to analyze the management of slum settlements based on sustainable development indicators in achieving sustainable development, namely ecological sustainability, economic sustainability, socio-cultural sustainability, political sustainability, and defense and security sustainability. The research method used is descriptive qualitative. Sources of research data by collecting primary data through interviews and secondary data through documentation and observation studies. The management of slum settlements based on sustainable development in the Deli watershed is still not optimal in terms of ecological sustainability, economic sustainability, and defense and security sustainability. Meanwhile, socio-cultural sustainability and political sustainability are quite optimal. The government must manage slum settlements based on sustainable development through an approach with the community and provide viable housing alternatives so that people do not live in watershed areas.

Identifying Decisive Socio-Political Sustainability Barriers in the Supply Chain of Banking Sector in India: Causality Analysis Using ISM and MICMAC

The banking sector often plays a crucial role in the improvement of infrastructure and economy of any country. In many emerging economies, it is apparent that a wide variety of social and political issues are related to the associated supply chain sustainability of financial service firms. Although such sustainability and its implementation issues have largely been addressed in existing research literature and in practice for many years, the attention towards socio-political sustainability aspects has been quite limited. Thus, this study attempted to explore the determinants for improving socio-political sustainability in financial service firms. Through adopting the fuzzy Delphi method (FDM), performing an exhaustive literature review, and conducting semi-structured interviews with the decision-makers of the service firms, nine key barriers for socio-political sustainability were first identified in this study. Then, the influence relationships of the key barriers were assessed by 15 experts. During the assessment process, the interrelationships and their dependence powers among key barriers were analyzed using the interpretive structural modelling (ISM) approach and cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) methods. The assessment results show that among the studied barriers, “antisocial considerations”, “unstable political climate”, and “lack of political coherence” are the decisive barriers that affect the socio-political sustainability in the supply chain of financial service firms. The knowledge in understanding and reducing these decisive barriers can provide service sector practitioners, especially those with limited resources, the enhanced capability to conduct better planning and designing of effective and continuous improvement programs, so as to win over new consumers and retain existing clients by offering sustainable services.

E-Government Adoption Among Employees

The United Nations have sustenance e-government to promote good governance for achieving Sustainable Development Goals – 2030 by fostering environmental, technological, socio-cultural, and political sustainability. Many countries are making sincere efforts to create an ecosystem for fostering e-government to contribute to Sustainable Development Goals. The government is investing a huge amount in e-government projects, but most of them are not able to meet the desired results. It has been reported that most of the e-government is failing due to the non-adoption behavior of employees. This chapter seeks to understand the employee's perspectives by discussing benefits, barriers, and enablers to adopting e-government through a systematic literature review.

The future of Europe: a political discussion of prospects of the European Union integration project

The European integration project as designed by its founders seventy years ago is experiencing difficulties in the current conditions of globalization, confronting challenges which were unpredictable beforehand. Many of these are of crucial character for the European Union, putting in question its constitutional organization, institutional structure, and political sustainability in the international balance of power. The list of most important issues includes ones like the yet incomplete character of the Union’s legal construction, which is balanced between supranational and national forms of regulation; the erosion of legitimacy of European institutions; the growing democracy deficits in transnational and national governance; the decline of solidarity in inter-governmental relations; and the falling level of accountability and decision-making mechanisms in Europe. The very natural response to these problems was a Pan-European discussion, stimulated by European elites after Brexit, on the future of the European project in order to frame existing opinions, provide a fresh start to “the European dream”, and possibly find appropriate solutions to legitimacy problems. An analysis of this ongoing discussion is the main subject of this article. This analysis involves such key issues as the future role of the EU founding agreements, as to keeping them or amending them in order to reconstruct the European constitutional settlement. It demonstrates the complex nature of the basic communitarian concept, in view of its various interpretations by different ideological trends such as cosmopolitism and confederation and federation movements. It explores the current agenda of institutional reforms involving parliamentarian and presidential strategies and reviews proposed solutions of the European leadership problem. The conclusion of the article makes it clear that the European Union is confronted today with the most dramatic challenge in its entire history. It consists in the necessity of making a decisive choice between two polar options — to preserve an amorphous conglomerate of states or to establish a new federal state. This must be done in a rather short period in order to avoid falling apart and to become a full-fledged and independent global political player.

Sustainability of the Energy Sector in Jordan: Challenges and Opportunities

The acceleration of economic development and rising standards of living have made energy security a top priority for policy makers worldwide. The issue of securing energy is particularly challenging for Jordan, which suffers from scarcity of natural resources, combined with the regional instability and conflicts. Based on desk research and on experts’ interviews, this study discusses the status quo of the energy sector in Jordan, its main challenges, and future aspirations. It thus contributes to the debate on how Jordan can ensure environmental, economic, social, and political sustainability of its energy sector. Jordan’s energy security has been historically linked to its relations with the neighboring countries and thus vulnerable to external shocks and outside political events. Notwithstanding reform efforts to reduce dependency from imports and some progress in diversifying the energy mix, energy security remains critical: the country imports around 94% of its energy, which represents approximately 10% of GDP. The growing domestic demand, which increases at a yearly rate of 3%, further adds to the pressure to envision strategies towards a more sustainable energy sector. These strategies will need to include investment in renewable energy, the reduction of energy consumption via increasing energy efficiency, and also synergic agreements with other countries. The interviewed experts highlighted the importance of governance for the successful implementation of these strategies. The creation of an enabling environment should go hand in hand with the involvement of all key stakeholders from energy and related sectors, into the development of a future vision of a sustainable energy sector.

Forced Structural Convergence in the Eurozone

The euro crisis has been a consequence of the structural divergence between the export-oriented growth models of Northern political economies and the domestic-demand oriented growth models of Southern political economies. In response to the crisis, the Monetary Union has established a regime of compulsory structural convergence on the Northern model that has asymmetrically imposed huge economic and social costs on its Southern member states. In economic terms, enforced structural transformation may perhaps work, but its distributional asymmetry that cannot be democratically legitimated undermines the regime’s political sustainability.

Scientific Discourse of Populism: Aspects of Economy and Tax Policy

Introduction. Insufficient level of the economic growth perceiving amongst population of even economically developed countries, growth of inequality of incomes and welfare caused the opening for the opportunities for exploitation of controversial narratives by non-systematic politicians of different spectra in order to obtain electoral dividends, that stipulates the initiation of scientific discourse on the sources, reasons and consequences of populism. Problem Statement. A populist impact in many of European and world countries as well as considerable challenges for economic and political sustainability stipulate the necessity for scientific cognition of that essence for further elaboration of receipts for minimization of negative and implementation of possible positive outcomes. Purpose. To generalize, to structure and to systematize the studies of the political and economic foundations of populism and its manifestations in the context of the formation and implementation of economic and fiscal (tax) policy. Materials and Methods. A methodological consensus as general method introduced on defining populism as ideology, policy and social movement grounded on coordination on the structural elements contained in the definitions of different research schools is implemented; a comparative analyses of Western European and Ukrainian populism; a factsheet and statistical analyses for substantiation of evidence-based tax populism in Ukraine. Results. The article reviews the publications of researchers on the problem of populism - its definition, analysis of social and economic foundations, as well as the impact on the fiscal and tax policies elaboration. On the basis of generalization of broad international research approached framework regarding the analysis of populist tax policy, the definition of tax populism is proposed. The reasons for the prevailing influence of right populism on the current tax policy in Ukraine. Introduced concept of elaboration of sustainable system of institutional and organizational-analytical measures grounded on the modernization of institutes of general public interest in the field of development and strengthening of political process coordination and economic policy. Conclusions. Generalized scientific, informational, analytical and statistical data about the objective essence of economic and tax populism growing tendencies in the world as well as danger of right-wing tax populism in the Ukraine.

Conclusion

This chapter focuses on the evidence-based medicine (EBM) reform project. Ultimately, if the EBM project is to realize its aspirational goal to improve the quality and efficiency of U.S. medical care, it is necessary but insufficient for research agencies like Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to endure. In the long run, patterns of medical governance must change. PCORI (or whatever entity succeeds it) must develop a reputation among key stakeholders for competence, relevance, and impact that causes policy makers to conclude that supporting EBM is in their own political interest. The chapter then draws on lessons from the literature on U.S. state building to develop strategies to increase the durability of medical governance reform in contemporary American politics. It also briefly reviews the challenges of political sustainability that face any new agency or policy.