Abstract

International audience; Drawing inspiration from researches on environmental crime and corporate crime, this chapter examines the case of air pollution caused by road transport and industry in France. The purpose of the author is first to document the nature and extent of these health threats to populations and second to highlight the existence of delinquent practices (defined as deliberate violations of legal norms) that sometimes play a major role in perpetuating these threats. The author first examines the issue of pollution caused by automobile engines and returns to “Dieselgate.” It then details the pollution problems observed in the Fos-sur-Mer industrial area in the south of France and its consequences on the health of local populations.

Abstract

This thesis argues that formal liberalization of service sectors is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition for increased competition. Service providers demand and governments supply providers with a certain level of protection, particularly in the form of financial state aid. On the basis of rent seeking and collective action considerations I argue that the level of protection partly depends upon the political power of established providers who defend their dominant position against potential rivals. These considerations are directly applied to the air transport sector of the European Union and empirically tested by means of ordered logit regression models. The results support the theoretical expectation that protectionism and hence the gap between liberalization and competition prevails particularly in markets where governments and airlines are closely connected in terms of equity stakes and personnel.

Abstract

In this review and analysis article we try to describe which is the polyhedral scenario the media industry, and most specially the legacy media, are facing to try to solve the crisis provoked by the digital disruption. Media are in a hybrid system where some other actors and platforms are competing to attract users’ attention and to achieve the revenues generated by news reporting activity. Journalism, as we knew it, was the industrial society’s son. The new social and economic model is bringing major changes to media companies, an industry that opted for a rather conservative strategy of taking a position in the World Wide Web, a shy development and adaptation to the possibilities of the digital language. New media are giving their contents mainly for free, a phenomenon that only recently seems to be reverted in some way. In this article we analyze those movements, the nature of news, first a commodity and now maybe a utility, and its value in the digital market. Also, we discuss the business models that the media companies are intending to implement decidedly in the next future, the lobbying activity of that industry in order to modify legal structures such as intellectual property and copyright, and the position that journalists adopt in this complex scenario.