Globalised interurban competition affects cities of various sizes and cities in various locations. Cities have to find ways to position themselves in global markets by formulating locational policies. To capture this wide range of policies, this paper develops an analytical framework of locational policies that is interdisciplinary informed by theories of economic geography and political science. We compare the cities of Lucerne and Ulm to illustrate the added value of the locational policies framework. We found that these two cities feature very different locational policies agendas. By employing a neo-institutional lens, we suggest that place-specific factors enable and constrain the formulation of locational policies. We outline three possible venues to tentatively explain these different locational policies, namely the economic sector mix, the national tax system, and politics. Beyond these empirical findings, this paper shows that the locational policies framework is able to capture a wide range of policies that aim to enhance the competitiveness of a city. Thus, the locational policies framework is a tool that can be used to reveal how cities face the globalised, and increasingly knowledge-intensive, interurban competition.

The question of whether and how federalism influences a country's welfare state has been a longstanding concern of political scientists. However, no agreement exists on exactly how, and under what conditions, federal structures impact the welfare state. This article examines this controversy. It concludes theoretically that the specific constellation of federal structures and distribution of powers need to be considered when theorising the effects of federalism on the welfare state. Using the case of Belgium and applying the synthetic control method, it is shown in the article that without the federalism reform of 1993, the country would have had further decreases in social spending rather than a consolidation of this spending in the years after 1993. In the case of Belgium, the combination of increased subnational spending autonomy in a still national financing system provided ideal conditions for a positive federalism effect on social spending to occur.

This study analyses the contradictory effects of decentralisation on public spending. We distinguish three dimensions of decentralisation and analyse their joint and separate effects on public spending in the Swiss cantons over 20 years. We find that overall decentralisation has a strong, significant and negative effect on the size of the public sector, thus confirming the Leviathan hypothesis. The same holds for fiscal and institutional decentralisation. However, the extent to which political processes and actors are organised locally rather than centrally actually increases central and decreases local spending. This suggests that actors behave strategically when dealing with the centre by offloading the more costly policies. The wider implication of our study is that the balance between self-rule and shared rule has implications also for the size of the overall political system.

The thermodynamic properties of carbonate minerals suggest a possibility for the use of the abundant materials (e.g., magnesite) for removing harmful divalent heavy metals (e.g., Pb2+). Despite the favourable thermodynamic condition for such transformation, batch experiments performed in this work indicate that the kinetic of the magnesite dissolution at room temperature is very slow. Another set of co-precipitation experiments from homogenous solution in the Mg-PbII-CO2-H2O system reveal that the solids formed can be grouped into two categories depending on the Pb/Mg ratio. The atomic ratio Pb/Mg is about 1 and 10 in the Mg-rich and Pb-rich phases, respectively. Both phases show a significant enrichment in Pb if compared with the initial stoichiometry of the aqueous solutions (Pb/Mg initial = 1·10−2–1·10−4). Finally, the growth of {10.4} magnesite surfaces in the absence and in the presence of Pb2+ was studied by in situ atomic force microscopy (AFM) measurements. In the presence of the foreign ion, a ten-fold increase in the spreading rate of the obtuse steps was observed. Further, the effect of solution ageing was also tested. We observed the nucleation of a secondary phase that quickly grows on the {10.4} surfaces of magnesite. The preferential incorporation of Pb2+ into the solid phase observed during precipitation and the catalytic effect of Pb2+ on magnesite growth are promising results for the development of environmental remediation processes. These processes, different from the transformation of magnesite into cerussite, are not limited by the slow dissolution rate of magnesite. Precipitation and growth require an external carbon source, thus they could be combined with carbon sequestration techniques.