This guide shows how a life cycle approach can be used to identify and reduce the environmental and health impacts of the products we use. It underlines the importance of considering these issues across the entire life cycle of a product and sets them within the context of policy development,...

This Country Focus studies the development of private consumption in France during the decade before the crisis. Are French consumers greater spendthrifts than their European fellows? In this paper, we estimate a consumption function to show that strong growth of private consumption in France...

In Germany private consumption virtually stagnated for nearly a decade and clearly lagged behind GDP growth. This Country Focus uses the estimation of a consumption function to show that the drop in employment is the most important factor behind the reluctance to consume in the first half of...

This study about legal and commercial guarantees, funded by the European Union in the frame of the EU Consumer Programme (2014-2020), looks at the extent to which sellers are aware of, and comply with, relevant EU legislation; the way in which legal and commercial guarantees are communicated to...

The overall purpose of this Behavioural Study on the Transparency of Online Platforms is to understand the impact of enhanced transparency on consumer trust and behaviour in searching and selecting goods and services on online platforms in three specific areas: Area #1: The general criteria used...

Previous research has shown that when buying products and services online, the vast majority of consumers accept Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) without even reading them. The current research examined effects of interventions aimed at making consumers aware of the quality of such T&Cs. This was...

In support of the preparatory actions of the EU’s Integrated Maritime Policy a set of projects were launched in 2008 and 2009 with the aim of creating five portals that assembled fragmented and inaccessible marine data into interoperable, contiguous and publicly available data streams for...