Suchergebnisse

The stakeholder-oriented nature of EU company law can be observed in the case of public or private limited liability companies. In the case of the former, protection of shareholders also comes in the forefront and it can be found through the information model legislation, demanding all relevant information to be presented to the shareholders, on the basis of which the shareholders take on the responsibility for their decisions. This shift of responsibility for protection from legislative provisions in the hands of company law actors can be also observed in the case of provisions addressed to creditors , albeit in limited form. The interplay of the two legislative approaches - information based Anglo-American approach and (minimum) harmonization Continental approach can be seen throughout the body of EU company law, including CJEU case law, but the use of one or another does not always depend on the EU legislative policy. The lack of harmonization of some basic company law principles across the national laws of Member States contributes to these shifts of legislative approaches and it does not always coherently follow the aims and goals of EU legislature concerning the internal market and international competitiveness of European businesses. In particular, competitiveness that is based on comparative advantages and not merely on size is at the present moment not promoted at the EU level. A company that focuses on internal growth and decides to change its legal form to public limited liability company faces a vast shift in applicable EU company law provisions that entail high costs, not providing a visible initiative for businesses to undertake such path. A shift in policy considerations would be advisable to achieve the goal that arose in the last decades at the EU level: since internal market is today insured, international competitiveness is next on the agenda and the same policy considerations as they were provided in the 1950s cannot hold today in the changed circumstances.

The strategic use of public procurement across the European Union to contribute to sustainable development has been underdeveloped and unequally distributed among the EU Member States, with seven Member States being sustainable public procurement leaders, and the rest of the Member States having a very modest sustainable public procurement uptake. While Spain has not been one of the best performers, the outstanding Catalan performance as a Spanish autonomous community calls for the analysis of the driving factors that enabled a high sustainable public procurement uptake at the regional and local level. The present article explores the policy coherence, the accompanying legal framework and the supporting activities that have been carried out in Catalonia to incorporate green public procurement as the default procurement option at the regional and local level to serve as a potential model for a transition towards green public procurement for other regional and local procurement authorities. ; The research was funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 789461 (SCOM Project – Sustainable Company).

The research was funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 789461 (SCOM Project - Sustainable Company)

The present research paper analyses the EU general and mandatory sectoral legal framework on public procurement, arguing for its inhibiting effect on the EU-wide uptake of green public procurement. It explores de jure and de facto barriers to green public procurement, motivated by the need for a change in the business world towards more sustainable practices through preferably mandatory legal changes of EU corporate law. As the public procurement represents a strong nudge for a qualitative change in private market demand, accounting for a minimum of 12% of the national gross domestic product, it should become environmentally sustainable itself and guide markets through the qualitative and quantitative changes on the demand side. Given the complexity of the current legal framework and the novelty of the approach to public procurement as a strategic tool for the achievement of sustainable production and consumption, a better defined and clear legislative approach is called for, possibly in a mandatory form, clarifying the obligation of public procurers to account for sustainability in their practices, especially as regards incorporating environmental concerns in their purchasing activities. In its current form, the EU legislative public procurement framework entails a seemingly permissive attitude towards green public procurement, hampered in practice by the existing legal institutes in the field, which hamper the strategic use of public procurement and thereby its influence on sustainability on the private markets. ; This research was funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 789461 (SCOM Project—Sustainable Company).

We examine the contribution of e-procurement to the institutional quality. To this end, we exploit the early adoption of large-scale e-procurement platforms in three EU countries to consistently estimate the effect of procurement policy change on the institutional quality. Our identification strategy relies on the institutional quality trends similarity between early-adopting countries and the rest of the world and uses a battery of covariates to match the treated and control group to parse out the level of early-adopters' institutional quality had the e-procurement not been implemented. Drawing on a large sample of 108 countries for the period 1996-2017, our synthetic control and difference-in-differences estimates indicate significant improvements in public sector efficiency and rule of law in the countries with a high-level of pre-reform institutional quality and a pervasive deterioration in the ability to control corruption and quality of regulation in the setting with lower pre-reform institutional quality. The estimated effects of adopting e-procurement on institutional quality are robust to a number of specification checks, treatment sensitivity analyses and donor sample selection issues. ; The research was funded by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 789461 (SCOM project – sustainable company).