•Fictional expectations leading to Brexit mediation only devolved to high value subsidiaries.•All subsidiaries constructed fictional expectations based on a ‘no-deal’ Brexit.•High value subsidiaries ...produce fictional expectations on addressing past major uncertainties.•Low value subsidiaries produce fictional expectations on addressing minor uncertainties.•Only high value subsidiaries can undertake more substantial uncertainty ‘coping’.
Major periods of regulatory, institutional and economic upheaval can have significant impacts on firms. They have to mediate resulting uncertainties, but where such actions are geographically uneven as firms respond in different ways. Actors construct mental representations of a future reality based on existing understandings of a situation, which seeks to influence and guide other actors, termed ‘fictional expectations’ (Beckert, 2016). These issues are important for foreign owned subsidiaries, since they work through intracorporate processes and politics, global production networks, and host regions. The UK’s decision to leave the EU in June 2016 produced significant uncertainties around the final type of trading agreement. This paper examines how foreign subsidiaries in the Southeast of England and Wales mediated these uncertainties, and why particular fictional expectations were created in relation to the corporate contexts of subsidiaries and the nature of regional ‘coupling’. In conclusion, the paper finds that subsidiaries created fictional expectations to acquire devolved responsibility from HQs for mediating Brexit, and to address uncertainties relating to a potential ‘no deal’ and supplier issues. High value creation subsidiaries have greater autonomy and capabilities that facilitate fictional expectations that are able to acquire responsibility for Brexit mediation, and to undertake more substantive uncertainty reduction measures.
Abstract The effect of Brexit is an important topic in European and British political agendas. In this study, we examine the effect of Brexit on the Portuguese labour market. We apply the synthetic ...control method to estimate how the number of UK citizens working in Portugal would have evolved if the Remain vote had won the referendum. Our results suggest that the Brexit referendum reduced the number of UK-dependent workers in Portugal, particularly in the case of non-university-educated, male individuals with temporary employment contracts. This reduction is explained by the decrease in the number of incomers. We also find that those UK citizens who were already working in Portugal before Brexit were more likely to continue working in the host country.
This article offers a conjunctural analysis of the financial and political crisis within which Brexit occurred with a specific attentiveness to race and racism. Brexit and its aftermath have been ...overdetermined by racism, including racist violence. We suggest that the Leave campaign secured its victory by bringing together two contradictory but inter-locking visions. The first comprises an imperial longing to restore Britain's place in the world as primus inter pares that occludes any coming to terms with the corrosive legacies of colonial conquest and racist subjugation. The second takes the form of an insular, Powellite narrative of island retreat from a "globalizing" world, one that is no longer recognizably "British". Further, the article argues that an invisible driver of the Brexit vote and its racist aftermath has been a politicization of Englishness. We conclude by outlining some resources of hope that could potentially help to negotiate the current emergency.
This article uncovers the origins of 'cakeism' i.e., the notion the UK could keep certain EU benefits or not suffer costs after Brexit. The analysis demonstrates how the assumptions behind cakeism ...originated after 1992 in policy circles associated with the Conservative Party. They argued that a free-trade alternative to the EU was easy to put in place by simply disaggregating preferred elements of the single market from supranationalism. A Westminster-centric perspective also meant these proto-Brexiters were unable to countenance any potential domestic disruption caused by leaving the EU. During May's Brexit negotiations, European Research Group MPs resorted to cakeist arguments that reprised the same assumptions about international trade and the unitary nature of the UK state articulated well before 2016. Cakeist ideas helped scupper May's customs plan and paved the way for Johnson's free trade deal, thereby demonstrating the enduring influence of the early think-tank debate on leaving the EU.
We predicted cancer mortality statistics for 2021 for the European Union (EU) and its five most populous countries plus the UK. We also focused on pancreatic cancer and female lung cancer.
We ...obtained cancer death certifications and population data from the World Health Organization and Eurostat databases for 1970-2015. We predicted numbers of deaths and age-standardised (world population) rates for 2021 for total cancers and 10 major cancer sites, using a joinpoint regression model. We calculated the number of avoided deaths over the period 1989-2021.
We predicted 1 267 000 cancer deaths for 2021 in the EU, corresponding to age-standardised rates of 130.4/100 000 men (−6.6% since 2015) and 81.0/100 000 for women (−4.5%). We estimated further falls in male lung cancer rates, but still trending upward in women by +6.5%, reaching 14.5/100 000 in 2021. The breast cancer predicted rate in the EU was 13.3/100 000 (−7.8%). The rates for stomach and leukaemias in both sexes and for bladder in males are predicted to fall by >10%; trends for other cancer sites were also favourable, except for the pancreas, which showed stable patterns in both sexes, with predicted rates of 8.1/100 000 in men and 5.6/100 000 in women. Rates for pancreatic cancer in EU men aged 25-49 and 50-64 years declined, respectively, by 10% and 1.8%, while for those aged 65+ years increased by 1.3%. Rates fell for young women only (−3.4%). Over 1989-2021, about 5 million cancer deaths were avoided in the EU27 compared with peak rates in 1988.
Overall cancer mortality continues to fall in both sexes. However, specific focus is needed on pancreatic cancer, which shows a sizeable decline for young men only. Tobacco control remains a priority for the prevention of pancreatic and other tobacco-related cancers, which account for one-third of the total EU cancer deaths, especially in women, who showed less favourable trends.
•We estimated 7% falls in men and 5% in women between 2015 and 2021 in EU total cancer mortality rates.•Almost 5 million avoided cancer deaths are predicted over 1989-2021 in the EU27.•Pancreatic cancer should be a major focus of public health efforts, since no major declines in rates were observed overall.•Lung cancer in women still shows unfavourable trends.•Tobacco control remains a priority for cancer control across Europe.
The decision of the Cameron government to renegotiate the terms of UK membership and to hold an in-out referendum has triggered a novel process in European integration: differentiated disintegration, ...the selective reduction of a member state's level and scope of integration. The article starts from an established postfunctionalist explanation of differentiated integration and claims that it also explains demand for disintegration. In this perspective, Brexit resulted from a mix of integration effects (immigration) challenging self-determination, the rise of a Eurosceptic party, and the availability of referendums. By contrast, the institutional and material bargaining power of states demanding disintegration is considerably lower than that of states demanding opt-outs in the context of integration negotiations. Consequently, demanders of disintegration moderate their demands and make concessions to the EU in the course of negotiations. The ongoing UK-EU disintegration negotiations confirm this expectation.
This paper investigates the potential rupture that the United Kingdom's “Brexit” referendum of June 23, 2016, might bring about in intra‐European Union youth mobilities, with a specific focus on the ...London region. In many respects, and counter‐intuitively given the Brexit result, London has already become a “Eurocity”: a magnet for young people, both highly educated and less educated, from all over Europe who, especially since the turn of the millennium, have flocked to the city and its wider region to work, study, and play. Now, these erstwhile open‐ended migration trajectories have been potentially disrupted by a referendum result that few anticipated, and whose consequential results are still unclear. The main theoretical props for our analysis are the notions of “liquid migration,” “tactics of belonging,” “whiteness,” “privilege,” and “affect.” Data are drawn from 60 in‐depth interviews with Irish, Italian, and Romanian young‐adult students and higher and lower skilled workers, carried out in late 2015 and early 2016, plus 27 reinterviews carried out in late 2016, post‐Brexit. Results indicate participants' profound and generally negative reaction to Brexit and, as a consequence, a diversity of uncertainties and of plans over their future mobility: either to stay put using “tactics of belonging,” or to return home earlier than planned, or to move on to another country. Finally, we find evidence that new hierarchies and boundaries are drawn between intra‐European Union migrants as a result of Brexit.
PDF
