Suchergebnisse

The general goal of this paper is to study senior Romanian citizens' EU attitudes after ten years of European membership, with a special focus on the unsolved tension between the instrumental and symbolic perspectives. By looking at the present context, the purpose of this research is to assess the challenges and transformations of the EU-related opinions and support of traditional euro-enthusiastic citizens in times of vulnerability and struggling economies. Equally, the paper favours a future-oriented view, and puts under scrutiny people's expectations and evaluations of the future developments of the EU and their consequences at personal, national and supra-national level.

This paper considers the effects on current pensioner incomes of reforms designed to improve the long-term sustainability of public pension systems in the European Union. We use EUROMOD to simulate a set of common illustrative reforms for four countries selected on the basis of their diverse pension systems and patterns of poverty among the elderly: Denmark, Germany, Italy and the UK. The variations in fiscal and distributive effects on the one hand suggest that different paths for reform are necessary in order to achieve common objectives across countries, and on the other provide indications of the appropriate directions for reform in each case.

During the crisis the European Central Bank's roles have been greatly extended beyond its price stability mandate. In addition to the primary objective of price stability and the secondary objective of supporting EU economic policies, we identify ten new tasks related to monetary policy and financial stability. We argue that there are three main constraints on monetary policy: fiscal dominance, financial repercussions and regional divergences. By assessing the ECB's tasks in light of these constraints, we highlight a number of synergies between these tasks and the ECB's primary mandate of price stability. But we highlight major conflicts of interest related to the ECB's participation in financial assistance programmes. We also underline that the ECB's government bond purchasing programmes have introduced the concept of 'monetary policy under conditionality', which involves major dilemmas. A solution would be a major change towards a US-style system, in which state public debts are small, there are no federal bail-outs for states, the central bank does not purchase state debt and banks do not hold state debt. Such a change is unrealistic in the foreseeable future.

In 2007, the European Union launched a targeted Strategy for Central Asia, as a continuation of the efforts to improve the relations with the five post-soviet republics. The adoption in 2019 of a new EU Strategy for Central Asia offers the opportunity to include in the new strategic framework the lessons learned during the past decade of promoting the EU influence in the region, besides promoting measures to strengthen EU's global posture. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the capacity of the EU to mobilise resources for its foreign policy goals, specifically in relation with Central Asia. In examining this idea, I will use the framework offered by the neoclassical realist theory, mainly because in relation to some foreign policy objectives, the EU can be assimilated to a state.

European leaders have struggled to find common responses to the polycrisis the EU is facing. This crisis of leadership makes it urgent that scholars provide a better understanding of the role and impact of leadership in EU politics and policy making. This article prepares the ground for a collection of contributions that addresses this need by strengthening old and building new bridges between the academic domains of European studies and leadership studies. It opens with a discussion of the contested concept of leadership in the context of the European polity and politics, challenging the conventional view that leadership is necessarily a matter of hierarchy. Moreover, it argues that rather than leaderless, the EU is an intensely 'leaderful' polity. Subsequently, this introduction identifies four key debates in contemporary EU leadership research and discusses the value and insights the contributions in this special issue bring to these debates.

This paper presents an overview of the particularities of the administrative systems across the European Union. With more and more countries becoming members of the Union, legal and administrative harmonisation becomes more important than ever. Both internal and external aspects may trigger changes, whose scale will be dependent of many factors. It must be realised that administration in this case does not just mean dealing with bureaucratic red tape and obtaining documents, but rather it largely refers to the communal services provided by administrative units to their citizens. These will naturally have an effect on the socio-economic status of the served area, but lest one forget that there is also an environmental aspect to it. This paper will present an overview of the key aspects of administrative divisions across the European Union, and highlight the most important recent changes in the structure, and considering their sustainability aspects too.

Assessment of the enlargement issues, process of integration and the political, organizational, economic and financial guidelines necessary for the further course of the EU. Earlier version printed in European Review, Oct. 1997.

Beginning with the 20th century, lobby activities started to be developed and today the influence of the lobbying is used by nearly every group that has an important place at the international level. In this paper we describe the evolution of the concept of lobby at the international level and how this activity can influence European decision-makers. We consider that every citizen has the right to know how public decisions are designed, which interests are behind the allocation of resources, in which manner are expenses organized at central level and which are the techniques of influence. In this paper we explain how lobby activities help to analyse and design the decisions that affect the general interest.

Real divergences in economic performances that emerge between countries belonging to the Eurozone make it necessary to define an economic policy oriented towards a re-industrialization of some regions in Europe. In a world characterized by irreversibility of investment and imperfection of market information, supply-side reforms should consist in establishing a framework aimed at supporting both competition and cooperation between the various players of innovation, and thus allowing firm strategies to be successful. This requires reconsidering both national and European policies that are growth-enhancing, that is, industrial policy, competition policy, labour policy, regional policy, and banking policy. However, any change in the industrial landscape in Europe will only be possible if a new macroeconomic policy prevents the inappropriate destruction of productive capacities. 1. A