Recognised and shaped by regulatory strategies pulling in different directions, the European consumer may be portrayed as a fractured subject. By drawing from the Pasta and Hormones litigation, the article investigates its multiple and heterogeneous identities as resulting from the interaction...

Choice and competition policies in public services are popular reform strategies in the member states of the European Union (EU). The European choice agenda is based on the view in the EU of, "social policy as a productive factor," and the need for, "modernisation," of the EU welfare states....

This paper conducts an ontological inquiry into the identity of the European Union, and seeks to establish whether its core identity is of a cultural or political nature through looking at the debate generated by Turkey’s application for EU membership. The concepts of ‘the other’, the...

“Unity in Diversity” was the fortunate motto of the otherwise unfortunate Draft Constitutional Treaty. The motto did not make it into the Treaty of Lisbon. It deserves to be kept alive in a new constitutional perspective, namely the re-conceptualisation of European law as new type of...

This paper empirically examines the regional effects of sharing a single currency on bilateral trade with other European Union partners. It takes advantage of a gravity specification of bilateral trade between 17 Spanish regions and 13 European countries over the period 1997-2004, which in turn...

There is an increasing demand for putting a shadow price on the environment to guide public policy and incentivise private behaviour. In practice, setting that price can be extremely difficult as uncertainties abound. There is often uncertainty not just about individual parameters but about the...

We estimate the impacts of an energy tax – the Climate Change Levy (CCL) – on the manufacturing sector using panel data from the UK production census. Our identification strategy builds on the comparison of trends in outcomes between plants subject to the CCL and plants that were granted an...

At present the USA is - in per capita terms - the top greenhouse gas polluter among the world’s major economies. This is mirrored by the high energy intensity of all sectors of the US economy including manufacturing industries. A potential explanation for the higher energy intensity is lower...

This paper considers how environmental policies should respond to macroeconomic downturns. It first explores the implications of the global economic downturn of 2008-09 for environmental policies, focusing in particular on the example of action against climate change. The arguments for and...