The Eastern Enlargement of the EU saw a proliferation of association agreements with countries in the Ônear abroadÕ under EUÕs European Neighbourhood Policy framework. Although such agreements are considered to be strictly welfare-enhancing, there is very little evidence to show their...

Current account (CA) dispersion within European Union (EU) member states has been increasing progressively since the 1990s. Interestingly, the persistent deficits in many peripheral countries have not been accompanied by a significant growth process able to stimulate a long run rebalancing as...

The New Politics of the welfare state suggests that periods of welfare retrenchment present policy-makers with a qualitatively different set of challenges and electoral incentives compared to periods of welfare expansion. An unresolved puzzle for this literature is the relative electoral success...

The paper sets out to analyze the allocations of financial resources accruing to the European regions from the Regional, Rural Development and Agricultural policies of the European Union in order to assess their territorial coordination and synergies and their degree of compatibility with the...

Explanations of the dynamics of EU judicial politics must also account for its incidence, namely when and in which sectors litigation of EU law and ECJ judgments occur. This incidence, it is suggested relies on a relationship between three arenas, those for norm-setting, litigation and...

On 24 November 2009 the European Commission published its consultation paper on the EU 2020 strategy. This paper analyses European trade union responses, and contrasts the very limited participation in the exercise with the greater response to the Green Paper Modernising Labour Law three years...

In the public policy literature, there is a widespread belief that industry self-regulation would only take place—and lead to satisfactory results—if industry was faced with a credible threat of hierarchical government intervention. At the example of intermodal transport standardization,...

The paper presents a distinctive approach to cross-border ties between Europeans. In place of the standard focus on identity or trust, it recommends the study of practices of social comparison, understood as how citizens evoke relevant others for the purpose of situating and evaluating their...

Are 'modern societies' necessarily democratic societies and capitalist (or: market) societies? This is what most of the social sciences of the post-Second World War period have assumed, while only some strands of critical, often Marx-inspired approaches contested this connection. This essay...

What do the recent trends in German economic development convey about the trajectory of change? Has liberalization prepared the German economy to deal with new challenges? What effects will liberalization have on the coordinating capacities of economic institutions? This paper argues that...