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There is a great discrepancy between the omnipresent demands for inclusion published by official bodies and ministries and the actual participation of people with disabilities in social life. The policy cultivates the rhetoric of inclusion in programmatic and conceptual formulations, while at the same time maintaining or even expanding separative institutions for those that are considered not to be eligible for inclusion in the fields of education and employment (see competence centres in education and 'inclusion' in sheltered workshops, or the persistent exclusion of persons under guardianship from the right to vote). Inclusion is viewed primarily from an economic and neo-liberal perspective, without questioning the basic principles of a meritocratic society oriented towards proven performance. Performance appraisals, especially in the area of education and work, are largely based on the performance demanded and shown without sufficiently taking into account the way the performance is achieved. In the educational sector, the incompatibility of introducing educational standards and achieving full inclusion is not recognised. Separating establishments are renamed to inclusive settings without any fundamental reorientation. The former regional special schools for pupils with cognitive impairments were re-branded as competence centres for intellectual development. With the introduction of the competence centres, no longer official figures are published regarding pupils who are taught separately. There are also no official figures on how many pupils were assigned to the competence centres from regular schools and vice versa. It is therefore impossible to give comparative statistical evidence of the extent to which inclusive education has currently developed in Luxembourg. With regard to employment, the same problems remain as those already identified in the first Action Plan. People with disabilities experience considerable difficulty in finding a job in the mainstream labour market. Unemployment is disproportionately high among people with disabilities and lasts much longer than among job seekers without disabilities. People with disabilities are increasingly oriented towards working in a sheltered workshop under the national guidelines of the Employment Agency. The employment quotas for people with disabilities, which are legally mandated, are largely not met and are not monitored or imposed by the state. Also, some social problems already addressed in the first Action Plan have still not been tackled, such as the legal incapacity of people under guardianship. People with disabilities under guardianship are extensively excluded from self-determination and political participation. They may not vote nor may they run as candidates. As a result, almost 10 years after the introduction of the UN-CRPD no improvement has been made in this area. Furthermore, there are still problems in the implementation of the accessibility of buildings and infrastructure for public use.

This paper studies the conceptualization and quantification of 'competitiveness' within the main policy coordination framework of the EU, the European Semester. This topic warrants attention since 'competitiveness' is not only of central importance in the European policy discourse, but also a theoretically ambiguous and malleable concept with conflicting accentuations, all of which are subject of considerable academic and political debate. By investigating the translation of competition as a contested theoretical concept into concrete indicators within a legally binding document, the paper produces three main insights that deserve further attention, both scientifically and politically. First, the indicators of the semester mainly measure cost rather than technological competitiveness, indicating a constriction of the concept at the operational level. Second, while EU policy documents regularly stress the competitiveness of the European Union as a whole, the indicators in the semester measure individual country competitiveness. Finally, the indicators in the Semester measure how the competitiveness of single Member States changes over time, not how they perform relative to others. This shallows the heterogeneity of countries, which is problematic given recent findings according to which absolute differentials of competitiveness across Member States is one important driver of accelerating polarization patterns in the Union.

This paper studies the conceptualization and quantification of 'competitiveness' within the main policy coordination framework of the EU, the European Semester. This topic warrants attention since 'competitiveness' is not only of central importance in the European policy discourse, but also a theoretically ambiguous and malleable concept with conflicting accentuations, all of which are subject of considerable academic and political debate. By investigating the translation of competition as a contested theoretical concept into concrete indicators within a legally binding document, the paper produces three main insights that deserve further attention, both scientifically and politically. First, the indicators of the semester mainly measure cost rather than technological competitiveness, indicating a constriction of the concept at the operational level. Second, while EU policy documents regularly stress the competitiveness of the European Union as a whole, the indicators in the semester measure individual country competitiveness. Finally, the indicators in the Semester measure how the competitiveness of single Member States changes over time, not how they perform relative to others. This shallows the heterogeneity of countries, which is problematic given recent findings according to which absolute differentials of competitiveness across Member States is one important driver of accelerating polarization patterns in the Union.

The European Semester is an EU procedure, designed to facilitate coordination between national and EU actors in planning and implementing economic and fiscal policies and contribute to sustained economic convergence and employment in the EU. Scholars have highlighted this procedure as a crucial area of EU politics for national parliaments since its introduction in 2011. However, national parliaments participate differently in the European Semester. This article investigates which factors (institutional, political, economic) are more likely to intensify parliamentary engagement at the national stage of the procedure, based on a comparative quantitative analysis of parliamentary scrutiny activities across 35 parliaments/chambers in the EU over the 2014–2017 period. The article offers new insights about prospects for greater parliamentary accountability in the European Semester in practice.

Once it was introduced as an instrument for deepening European integration, the legitimacy, opportunity and utility of European Semester were repeatedly questioned from the perspective of its contribution to the institutionalization of European governance. Also, there is a strong and direct link between the further deepening of the European Union's political and economic integration on the one hand, and the development of a culture of evaluating policies and programs on the other. Taking these aspects into account, the following questions arise: does the European Commission have, in its position as manager of the European Semester, a real capacity of evaluating all aspects regarding the deepening of European integration? Can the European Semester be a means for diffusing evaluation practice at the level of Member States? This is why, in this paper, we propose to give answers to these questions.

The European Semester is a yearly process of the European Union to improve economic policy coordination and ensure the implementation of the EU's economic rules. Each Semester concludes with recommendations for the euro area as a whole and for each EU member state. We show that implementation of recommendations was poor at the beginning of the Semester in 2011, and has deteriorated since. The European Semester is not particularly effective at enforcing even the EU's fiscal and macroeconomic imbalance rules. We find that euro-area recommendations with tangible economic goals are not well reflected in the recommendations issued to member states. Finally, we review various proposals to improve the efficiency of the European Semester and conclude that while certain steps could be helpful, policy coordination will likely continue to have major limitations.

As a result of the euro crisis, EU economic governance has been reformed and EU institutions have gained new competences regarding national budgets, with the European Semester (the annual cycle of economic surveillance of the member states) being the most prominent example. With the Commission and the Council being the main actors, and the European Parliament playing only a minor role, a debate about the democratic legitimacy of the Semester and the role of national parliaments (NPs) in this regard has unfolded. This thematic issue, therefore, addresses the question of how parliamentary accountability of the European Semester has evolved: Have NPs met the challenge by adapting to the new situation in a way that allows them to hold the executive accountable? While the contributions to this thematic issue show significant variation across NPs, overall they reveal a rather pessimistic picture: Despite several institutional innovations concerning the reforms of internal rules and procedures, the rise of independent fiscal institutions, inter-parliamentary cooperation, and hearings with the European Commissioners, NPs have remained rather weak actors in EU economic governance also ten years after the Semester's introduction. Whether recent changes linked to the establishment of the Recovery and Resilience Facility introduced in response to the Covid-19 crisis will change the picture significantly remains to be examined.