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Due to the demographic development, public pension systems in the European Union organized on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) principle will be forced to either raise contribution rates or taxes, shorten future replacement rates, or enforce a combination of both. In this regard, two important issues have to be addressed: The first issue refers to the question of measuring the public pension liabilities of private households until today. The extent of these liabilities has an impact on the saving behaviour. The second issue refers to the consequences of the demographic development for future retirees and contributors and examines the sustainability of pension schemes by confronting the present value of future pension payments with the present value of future contributions.

Aus sowjetischer Sicht

Turkey's Accession to the European Union: Political and Economic Challenges, edited by Belgin Akçay and Bahri Yilmaz, examines economic and political assessments concerning Turkey's road to inclusion in the European Union. This book provides a timely overview of some of the most important issues and debates in the changing context of Europe, the changing context of domestic politics and foreign policy in Turkey, and the likely implications of these changes and developments for EU-Turkey relations

Under what conditions do Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) give attention to EU issues in European Parliament (EP) election campaigns? This study examines how party positioning on European integration and individual electoral incentives affected MEPs' attention to EU issues in the 2019 EP election campaign. Based on data collected from Twitter, the findings show that pro-EU parties and individual vote-seeking incentives increased attention to EU issues. More specifically, they show that MEPs from pro-EU mainstream parties had incentives to debate about EU issues, especially when they competed for votes. The findings help to unfold the interplay between party-level and legislator-level factors and its effects on attention to EU issues and aim to contribute to research on EU issue salience and EP election campaigns.

This article attempts to demonstrate the importance of the discursive context for whether and, if so, how the European Union (EU) can exert normative power in different policy areas. Surprisingly, the concept of power has not been extensively discussed in the academic literature on Normative Power Europe, with the notable exceptions of Diez (2013); Keene (2012); Forsberg (2011) and Huelss (2011) (who also discuss the meaning of the 'normative'). Focusing on power, the question asked in this article is how the discursive context of the politics of religion affects the EU's ability to exert normative power in this area. The article examines the politics of religion by looking at the case of the debate about human rights versus religion in the United Nations Human Rights Council after the year 2000. The broader point addressed in the article is whether the EU can exert normative power regardless of the discursive context of the policy area concerned.

Over the last decade, European Union members have experienced a dramatic increase in imports. This increase was accompanied by a strong growth in the number of imported goods and trading partners, indicating positive welfare gains for consumers via an extended set of consumption possibilities, as pointed out in the "New Trade Theory". In this paper, we apply the methodology developed by Feenstra (1994) and Broda and Weinstein (2006) to estimate structurally the gains from imported variety for the 27 countries of the European Union using highly disaggregated trade data at the HTS-8 level from Eurostat for the period of 1999 to 2008. Our results show that, within the European Union, especially "newer" and smaller member states exhibit high gains from newly imported varieties. Furthermore, we find that the vast majority of the gains from variety for consumers stem from intra-European Union trade.

International actors promoted the transfer of regulatory authority and financial resources from national governments to the European Union (EU) in the context of establishing the prerequisites for financial stability in Europe through banking union. It was supplied, however, by a political process that kept significant resources in resolution and deposit insurance largely in national hands. This article examines the politics behind those decisions, and how the hybrid of European and national competences affects bank regulation and financial stability in the EU. It concludes that the tension between strong EU supervisory powers and weak capacity to deal with insolvent institutions will persist.