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AbstractAlthough systematic policy evaluation has been conducted for decades and has been growing strongly within the European Union (EU) institutions and in the member states, it remains largely underexplored in political science literatures. Extant work in political science and public policy typically focuses on elements such as agenda setting, policy shaping, decision making, or implementation rather than evaluation. Although individual pieces of research on evaluation in the EU have started to emerge, most often regarding policy "effectiveness" (one criterion among many in evaluation), a more structured approach is currently missing. This special issue aims to address this gap in political science by focusing on four key focal points: evaluation institutions (including rules and cultures), evaluation actors and interests (including competencies, power, roles and tasks), evaluation design (including research methods and theories, and their impact on policy design and legislation), and finally, evaluation purpose and use (including the relationships between discourse and scientific evidence, political attitudes and strategic use). The special issue considers how each of these elements contributes to an evolving governance system in the EU, where evaluation is playing an increasingly important role in decision making.

Despite an abundant literature on policy implementation, there has hardly been any systematic cross-national and cross-sectional research focusing on implementation of supranational policies in both law and practice. The first part of this dissertation is a first attempt to analyse the relationship between legal and practical implementation and the causes for decoupling implementation of EU directives in practice in 27 member states across four policy areas. To study how EU policy can take root in society, further analysis focuses on the conditions under which a cooperative and engaged civil society can improve implementation on the ground. The findings show that civil society strength can positively affect practical implementation if civil society organizations are regularly consulted and states have the bureaucratic capacity to cope with societal demands. The second part of the dissertation takes a network approach to analyse the role of civil society as a watchdog and their capacity to monitor the implementation process. The comparative case study on networks of women's groups across EU members states in monitoring the implementation of EU directives on gender equality reveals that civil society in western member states tend to be better equipped, while in CEE member states the direct links with the EU Commission compensate this lack of resources. Finally, using inferential social network analysis in a case study on the monitoring network of women groups in the Netherlands, the findings of this dissertation demonstrate that effective information exchange for monitoring purposes benefits from a diverse and inclusive network.

Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) between the European Union (EU) and trade partners go far beyond mere elimination of tariffs to include such diverse issues as non-tariff barriers, competition legislation, investment protection, and more. Implementing such provisions requires deep institutional and policy adjustments. This report reviews the international experiences with institutional and policy adjustments needed to implement FTAs with the EU, as seen from a developing country perspective. It focuses on three issues: investment, competitiveness, and competition, including state-owned enterprise reform. The report concludes that the FTAs represent significant challenges for developing countries, but also potential opportunities for a more efficient trading system.

This paper incorporates exogenous production shocks into short‐run policy making process, and altruism is introduced into government utility functions under cooperative policy making scenario. The results reveal that the noisy signal from production shocks and government's self‐interested behaviors consist of the main barriers to make cooperative trade negotiations between agricultural importers and exporters. Finally, the project puts forward that domestic public storage policy is a feasible way for storable agricultural products to buffer production shocks and to stabilize domestic price in the context of agricultural price fluctuations with high frequency, and limited function of the WTO with respect to restricting governments' trade policies.

Consequences of U.S. policy, including its preference for bilateral trade agreements.

1\. Introduction 6 2\. Non-Compliance and Policy-Variation 7 3\. Policy- Explanations 12 4\. Rule-specific Explanations 18 5\. Conclusions 27 Literature 29 Appendix: Operationalization of Power and Capacity 33 ; The European Union's infringement procedure is highly legalized. Nevertheless, as in other international institutions, non-compliance occurs on a regular basis and its transformation into compliance varies across EU infringement stages and over time. State of the art compliance literature focuses mainly on country-specific explanations, such as power, capacity, and legitimacy. In particular power-capacity models explain a good part of whether non-compliance occurs and how quickly it can be resolved. Yet, these approaches leave substantial parts of the empirical variation that we observe unexplained. This paper argues that policy and, in particular, rule-specific variables – although often neglected – are important for explaining non-compliance. Based on a quantitative analysis, we show that policy matters not only for the frequency with which EU law is violated, but also the persistence of non- compliance over time and over the different stages of the infringement procedure.

Some historians think that the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) of 1934 marked a revolution in the American commercial policy. In order to evaluate this assessment the author examines in detail the trade policy instruments implemented and the outcomes yielded by the American trade policy after 1934 and before the GATT came into effect (1948). He concludes that the RTAA did not revolutionize the American trade policy. The RTAA conveys first of all a change in the protection technology. But the 'new' American trade policy was also given the goal to expand American exports and to promote the American economic and political influence in the world, while the 'ancient' one has been more defensive and had intended first to protect the American economy from foreign competition.