This paper analyses the continued decline of trade unions in Britain and examines the possible implications for workers, employers, and unions themselves. Membership of trade unions declined precipitously in the 1980s and 1990s. The rate of decline has slowed in the most recent decade, but we find that unions remain vulnerable to further erosion of their membership and influence. Acknowledgemen...

A unionized duopoly model to analyse how unions affect the incentives for merger is considered. It is found that both firms will merge if and only if unions are weak. However, once surplus-maximizing unions have the option to delegate the wage bargaining to wage-maximizing delegates (such as senior union members), both firms may have incentives to merge even if the union bargaining power is str...

We develop a bounded version of the nite injury priority method in recursion theory. We use this to study the learnability of unions of rectangles over the domain f0; : : :; n? 1g d with only equivalence queries. Applying this method, we show three main results: (1) The class of unions of rectangles is polynomial time learnable for constant dimension d. (2) The class of unions of rectangles who...

.................................................................................................................... ix Sommario .................................................................................................................. xi 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Motivation .............

The EU is currently reshaping its customs legislation and practices. Main pillars in the new vision are an intensive use of IT (Customs becomes e-Customs), partnerships between Customs administrations and businesses, and collaboration between national Customs administrations. These concepts should support coping with the dilemma of on the one hand increasing security, safety, financial and heal...

Credit unions are small, cooperative, not-for-profit institutions, which distinguishes them from other financial intermediaries. In this study we conduct a performance evaluation of credit unions. The criteria respect the unique organizational and institutional features of credit unions, without losing sight of the fact that they must compete with other financial intermediaries. We use nonparam...

US Customs embarked on a major modernization initiative of its Information Technology systems. Drawing in data from Customs trade systems, targeting inspectors review manifest information as well as strategic and tactical intelligence to determine which shipments and containers are “high-risk.” This entails a considerable level of communication and data sharing between various government agenci...

This paper reports on an ongoing study of an initiative to build e-Customs capabilities in eastern Africa. The EU’s customs capability building unit is trying to “export” e-Customs solutions to developing countries in order to strengthen the competiveness of companies based in these countries. Following the international development, eCustoms (with the improved control and traceability possibil...