Suchergebnisse

"While the European integration project is facing new challenges, abandonments and criticism, it is often forgotten that there are powerful legal instruments that allow citizens to protect and extend their rights. These instruments and the actions taken to activate them are often overlooked and deliberately ignored in the mainstream debates.This book presents a selection of cases in which legal institutions, social movements, avant-gardes and minorities have tried, and often succeeded, to enhance the current state of human rights through traditional as well as innovative actions. The chapters of this book investigate some of the cases in which the gap between the conventionally recognized rights and those advocated is becoming wider and where traditionally disadvantaged groups raise new problems or new issues are emerging concerning individual freedom, transparency and accountability, which are not yet properly addressed in the current political and legal landscape. Can political institutions and courts without coercive power of last resort actually foster more progressive rights? This book suggests that the expansion of human rights might be a viable strategy to generate a proper European citizenship.This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Studies, Politics and International Relations, Law and Society, Sociology and Migration Studies and more broadly to NGOS and policy-advisers."--Provided by publisher.

The aim of this paper is to review the European Monetary Union's history and development and to describe its advantages and disadvantages. I chose this topic because the EMU is one of the highest levels of integration forms and still unique in history. The member states adopted a single currency, the Euro, a single monetary policy, and coordinated their macroeconomic policies. Due to this high integration, the Euro may yet become a rival for the U.S. dollar. The size of the EMU's geographical area is vast and still expanding. As it spreads, the Euro becomes a more and more relevant currency for international trade, causing a big change in the world's economy. Aside from projecting the Euro's spread, I analyze the special convergence criteria that must be observed by its member states, demonstrating why these criteria are inadequate and why they are so difficult to observe for some countries. It is important to understand the issues facing the Euro and the countries that use or are considering using it as more and more economists discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the European Monetary Union. Many arguments exist for the EMU and many exist against it. Since Hungary, my home country is an EU member state and we intend to join the EMU--although the accession date was postponed several times because our economic indicators did not meet the criteria of the EMU--it is important for us to be knowledgeable about the current situation. Keywords: European Monetary Union, currency, monetary policy

"This book fills a gap in academic literature on the politics and public policy aspects of central banking in Europe, by conducting a theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded analysis of central banking governance before and after the establishment of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)." "The main framework for analysis is a multi-level institutionalist approach, articulated on three interconnected levels: the systemic-level, which encompasses the European, transnational and international arenas; the national-level, which considers the configuration of the domestic socio-economic and political environment in which each central bank operates; and the micro-institutional level, which deals with the specific features of each central bank."

This paper considers whether political business cycles existed in East European accession countries during the period 1990-9. Based on the Mundell-Fleming model expanded in Clark and Hallerberg (2000), we argue that the type of exchange rate regime and the relative independence of the central bank affects the instruments governments use to influence the economy before elections. In our empirical analysis, we find that accession countries with dependent central banks and flexible exchange rates have looser monetary policies in electoral periods than in non-electoral periods. If a country has a fixed exchange rate regime, it manipulates its economy in election years through running larger budgets instead of through looser monetary policy. The presence of such cycles in Eastern Europe has implications for the introduction of the euro in EU accession countries.