Suchergebnisse

Abstract Background Cancer centers are pressured to deliver high-quality services that can be measured and improved, which has led to an increase of assessments in many countries. A critical area of quality improvement is to improve patient outcome. An overview of existing assessments can help stakeholders (e.g., healthcare professionals, managers and policy makers) improve the quality of cancer research and care and lead to patient benefits. This paper presents key aspects of assessments undertaken by European cancer centers, such as: are assessments mandatory or voluntary? Do they focus on evaluating research, care or both? And are they international or national? Methods A survey was sent to 33 cancer centers in 28 European Union member states. Participants were asked to score the specifics for each assessment that they listed. Results Based on the responses from 19 cancer centers from 18 member states, we found 109 assessments. The numbers have steadily increased from 1990's till 2015. Although, a majority of assessments are on patient-care aspects ( n = 45), it is unclear how many of those include assessing patient benefits. Only few assessments cover basic research. There is an increasing trend towards mixed assessments (i.e., combining research and patient-care aspects) Conclusions The need for assessments in cancer centers is increasing. To improve efforts in the quality of research and patient care and to prevent new assessments that "reinvent the wheel", it is advised to start comparative research into the assessments that are likely to bring patient benefits and improve patient outcome. Do assessments provide consistent and reliable information that create added value for all key stakeholders?

Clear, balanced and accessible, this book explores the alternative of a flexible European Union (EU) based on differentiated rather than uniform integration. They examine the circumstances and institutional design needed for flexibility to promote rather than undermine fairness and democracy within and between member states.

"Since 9/11 Western states have sought to integrate 'securitisation' measures within migration regimes as asylum seekers and other migrant categories come to be seen as agents of social instability or as potential terrorists seeking to exploit immigration systems. But the upshot of treating migration as a security threat is the increased insecurity amongst migrant and ethnic minority populations in the West and particularly among those from Muslim majority countries or long-settled Muslim communities. This study of migration and security therefore considers whether national-societal or human-centric perspectives should be adopted, and whether the divergent and competing approaches to security (national, societal, human) can or should ever be reconciled. The questions arising from this dilemma are important for academics, policy-makers and the general public"--

The European Union's (EU) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) stipulates that all member states must unanimously ratify policy proposals through their representatives on the EU Council. Intergovernmentalism, or the need for equal agreement from all member nations, is used by many political scientists and policy analysts to study how the EU achieves its CFSP. However, in European Foreign and Security Policy, Catherine Gegout modifies this theory, arguing instead for analyses based on what she terms 'constrained intergovernmentalism.'Gegout's theory of constrained intergovernmentalism allows for member states, in particular France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, to bargain with one another and to make rational decisions but also takes into account the constraints imposed by the United States, the European Commission, and the precedents set by past decisions. Three in-depth case studies of CFSP decision-making support her argument, as she examines the EU position on China's human rights record, EU sanctions against Serbia, and EU relations with NATO

The aim of this paper is to study the determinants of sovereign debt maturity for 23 European countries during the period between 1995 and 2013. For this purpose, we use quantile regressions with robust standard errors clustered by countries to consider the impact of the determinants in the entire distribution. The results indicate a positive relation between the level of debt of the country and sovereign debt maturity, particularly for countries with the lowest debt maturity. We also find evidence of a negative relationship between sovereign risk and debt maturity for the lowest and intermediate values of the debt maturity.

In response to the rise of authoritarianism in Poland and Hungary, several prominent scholars have called upon the EU to intervene in order to protect its constitutional values. One of the strongest albeit controversial arguments in favour of an intervention is that the EU is a form of transnational 'militant democracy'. This chapter partly agrees with this assessment. The post-WWII European 'constitutional imagination' is shaped by the interwar collapse of the European legal and political order. This led to the development of a new form of post-fascist constitutionalism founded upon a 'fear of the people'. Within post-fascist constitutionalism, 'Europe' promises to save the European peoples from themselves. Nevertheless, this type of constitutionalism is not dominant in all the Member States. At least two other varieties of constitutionalism influence the EU Member States – 'evolutionary constitutionalism' and 'post-communist constitutionalism' – both of which have an ambiguous, yet intimate, relationship to the project of European integration.

Delegation in the European Union (EU) involves a series of principal-agent problems, and the various chains of delegation involve voters, parties, parliaments, governments, the European Commission and the European Parliament. While the literature has focused on how government parties attempt to monitor EU affairs through committees in national parliaments and through Council committees at the EU level, much less is known about the strategies opposition parties use to reduce informational deficits regarding European issues. This article argues that the European Parliament (EP) offers opposition parties an arena to pursue executive oversight through the use of written parliamentary questions. Using a novel dataset on parliamentary questions in the EP, this article examines why Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) ask questions of specific Commissioners. It transpires that MEPs from national opposition parties are more likely to ask questions of Commissioners. Questions provide these parties with inexpensive access to executive scrutiny. This finding has implications for the study of parliamentary delegation and party politics inside federal legislatures such as the EP. Adapted from the source document.

In this article I analyse the EU's social status in world politics. I argue that recognition grants the EU both club and positional status. Drawing on existing literature on status in international relations, I conceptualize the diplomatic corps of various polities as the embodied recognition of their positional status in world politics. To indicate and measure the positional status of the EU, I applied social network analysis to data on the exchange of embassies from 1960 to 2010. This methodology allows for consistent longitudinal comparisons of standing between heterogeneous polities in world politics. The results indicate that the EU's rise in the status hierarchy has been meteoric since 1960. However, fear of status congestion and status dilution among countries has thwarted the EU's full inclusion into the various status clubs of nation-states. I show that due to its lack of full club status the EU struggles to convert its high positional status into influence.

The revival of international migration in the last fifteen years has spurred economists to more systematically study their determinants and consequences. This contribution expands the existing literature in two directions. First we focus on the European Union as a whole and compare it to the US and other countries with net immigration (Canada, Australia and Switzerland). In so doing we establish some important facts about their capacity to attract migrant, and to foster internal migration across countries. Second, we analyze more systematically the causes and consequences of international migration of workers with different educational levels. We use a recent data set based on census information on natives and foreign born in 28 OECD countries for the year 2000. Four important facts emerge: 1) The European Union, far from acting like an integrated labor market (such as the US), exhibits low levels of cross-country internal mobility (for all skill levels) even compared to other OECD countries. 2) The European Union lags far behind the US and other immigration countries (Canada, Australia, Switzerland) in its ability to attract immigrants from outside (for all skills levels). 3) While typical immigration economies attract international migrants whose schooling achievements are complementary to those of natives, thus increasing wages for a majority of their natives, the EU attracts immigrants whose education levels mirror those of its natives and may depress wage for a majority of them. 4) Within the EU, Great Britain is the most similar to the immigration economies in terms of its ability to attract skilled migrants and in the composition of immigrants across schooling groups.