Suchergebnisse

As the world continues to see various facets of financial integration, the topic has sparked a great deal of discussions among policymakers and economists. The article analyzes benefits and risks of financial integration in the context of the European Union, which has facilitated global financial integration immensely by creating common currency among European Monetary Union countries and harmonizing regulations across the region. Upon examining main pros and cons of financial integration in detail, I conclude that financial integration can be beneficial in the longrun if corrective and preventive measures are enforced to curtail risks and threats it poses.

What is the EU for? In light of the current state of European integration, EU law cannot meaningfully be appreciated without understanding the political, social and cultural context within which it operates. This textbook proposes a fresh, accessible and interdisciplinary take on the subject that is suitable for one-semester and introductory courses wishing to engage the reader with the wider context of the EU project. It situates the institutions, legal order and central policy domains of the EU in their context and offer students the tools to critically analyse and reflect on European integration and its consequences. With pedagogical features such as further reading, class questions and essay/exams questions to support learning, this textbook enables students to form their own informed opinion on whether the EU offers an appropriate answer to the many questions that it is asked.

Brexit is a tale of two unions, not one: the British and the European unions. Their origins are different, but both struggle to maintain unity in diversity and both have to face the challenge of populism and claims of democratic deficit. Mark Corner suggests that the »four nations« that make up the UK can only survive as part of a single nation-state, if the country looks more sympathetically at the very European structures from which it has chosen to detach itself. This study addresses both academic and lay audiences interested in the current situation of the UK, particularly the strains raised by devolution and Brexit.

Has the European Union (EU) succeeded in socializing citizens to support the democratic values it claims to promote? On the face of it, the prevailing skepticism precludes any expectation of a successful socialization of EU citizens to the EU values. Yet, according to the socialization hypothesis, citizens' support for these values is expected to increase as countries accumulate more years of the EU membership. Using survey data to isolate distinct dimensions of democratic values, we examine differences among countries in this regard, as well as changes within countries over time. Results confirm the socialization hypothesis, showing that support for democratic values is generally higher in countries with more years of the EU membership, and that this support trends upwards over time.

"The Principles of European Law on Commercial Agency, Franchise and Distribution Contracts (PEL CAFDC, 2006) are an academic proposal of the Study Group on a European Civil Code for the European-wide regulation of the contents of these three types of agreements. The academic analysis ""Franchising in European Contract Law"" focuses on the harmonised Principles on Franchising.At present all member states of the EU have their own regulation on franchising. This situation might change in the light of the political process of Europeanization of contract law that was initiated by the European Commission in 2001. As a result of that process the Principles on Franchising could be declared a set of rules which might be opted for by the parties to franchising contracts Europe-wide to govern their relationship. In this analysis the main obligations in franchising in PEL CAFDC are compared with those under French and Spanish law.The main conclusion of this thesis research has been that the main obligations of parties in franchising under the PEL CAFDC resemble those under French and Spanish law. Eventually, differences will arise depending on how national courts weigh the interests of the parties in each case. A second conclusion has been that a choice for the PEL CAFDC instead of for French and Spanish law could be considered a rational alternative concerning the applicable system of remedies and legal certainty.

Abstract.  What is the structure of the political space in which decision‐making actors operate in the European Union? Are there consistent alignments of actors? This article addresses these questions by examining a new data set containing information on the preferences of the Commission, the Member States and the European Parliament on 174 issues raised during talks on 70 recent Commission proposals. To a limited extent, the preference alignments can be described in terms of two underlying dimensions. However, these conceptual structures are weak. The first dimension is defined by the position of the European Commission and European Parliament at one end and the reference point at the other; the second dimension by a division between the Northern and Southern Member States. The meaning of these dimensions is investigated by identifying the substance of the policy issues on which these actor alignments are found. The Commission‐reference point dimension is interpreted in terms of policy change rather than, as has previously been suggested, the level of integration. The North‐South dimension corresponds to diverging views on the use of regulatory versus market‐based solutions to policy problems. The weakness of these conceptual structures, it is argued, is due to the sectoral nature of European Union decision making. This lack of structure is likely to have a positive effect on support for the system among its members, since the benign effects of ideology at the national level cannot be expected to apply at the European Union level.

We provide comprehensive evidence of the widespread occurrence of inflation convergence between all countries of the European Union from 1999 to 2016. We also show that convergence was more inclusive in the years after the global financial crisis-including the European sovereign debt crisis and the period of zero lower bound-and that price-stabilityoriented monetary strategies might have in fact facilitated this convergence. Our results are robust with respect to the use of three inflation benchmarks (the cross-sectional average, the inflation target of the European Central Bank, and the Maastricht criterion), structural breaks, and a core inflation measure. Our main findings imply that further enlargement of the euro area is feasible from the perspective of the convergence of inflation rates between the countries of the European Union.

This paper reviews progress made in the development of public management systems capable of meeting European standards in the new member states of the European Union, looking into the people, systems, and service delivery aspects of public management systems. The new member states face considerable challenges-improving fiscal management, building absorption capacity of rapidly increasing levels of EU structural funds, and enhancing economic competitiveness-making essential the building of high-quality public management systems. The studyapplies existing tools for comparative analysis and benchmarking of public management quality used in the context of the EU. It draws conclusions on why progress has been slow on introducing competitive public managements systems and practices in the new member states. This report proposes an agenda for reform as well as alternatives to traditional approaches to strengthening public management systems.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of the credit expansion process on social welfare through the financial-monetary dimension with a focus on 22 economies from the European Union. In order to achieve this aim, the study seeks, on the one hand, to analyse the short-term dynamics (from one quarter to the other) of the relationships between the total volume of domestic credit to private sector (highlighting thus the credit expansion process) and the GDP per capita (the proxy for social welfare) and, on the other hand, to determine the impact of credit expansion on social welfare on medium and long term using the multiple regression model. The findings revealed that even the correlation between the credit expansion and social welfare is very strong and positive in almost all the analysed countries, the total volume of domestic credit to private sector influences unidirectionally the GDP per capita in only 11 of the 22 states. However, on medium and long term, the credit expansion process has a positive effect on social welfare in all the analysed EU countries.

Defense date: 30 September 2009 ; Examining Board: Marise Cremona (EUI, Law Department), Christopher Hughes (LSE), Pascal Vennesson (EUI/RSCAS) (Supervisor), Lanxin Xiang (Grad Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva) ; First made available online 1 October 2019 ; This thesis investigates how Chinese decision-makers deal with the complexities of EU foreign-policy making. Which of the many entities within in the EU, among Brussels-based institutions and in member states, do they approach and how? How can the modalities of engagement be explained? What patterns emerge and how and why do they change over time? In answering these questions, the thesis provides insights on three under-researched issues of international relations: first, on how outsiders engage with the EU and whether the EU is capable of managing requests from the outside; second, on how China makes its EU policy, and, by extension, to what extent its decision-making structure can deal with complex foreignpolicy challenges; third, and more generally, on how international actors interact through numerous contacts among the bureaucratic agents within them. To reach these goals, a new analytical framework is introduced that distinguishes three processes to explain such transnational bureaucratic interaction. First, the decisionmaking in China on how to engage the EU. Second, the reception this approach receives on the EU side. These first two processes are analysed as based on the interplay of organisational logic, bureaucratic politics, and the degree of central control. Third, there are independent dynamics of direct interaction between bureaucratic entities, which result from the quality of personal relations and the matches or mismatches in preferences, worldviews, and perceptions. Two intensive case studies are performed, one on China's efforts to be recognised as a market economy by the EU, and another on the Chinese push to have the EU lift its arms embargo against China. The thesis proposes a threefold argument. First, due to complex formal rules and volatile informal patterns of EU foreign policy, the EU remains difficult to approach for third actors and is incapable of managing requests from the outside. Second, engaging a complex counterpart like the EU puts strain on the foreign-policy process. Chinese policy making suffers from strong horizontal divisions which prevent the distribution of expertise and hinder the formation of elaborate strategies for approaching the EU. Lastly, in order to explain the modalities of interaction between different actors in international affairs, it is crucial to look at how the bureaucratic agents involved in the foreign-policy process interact with their respective counterparts.