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 analyses the current system of decentralised administrative support and coordination within the European Commission, focussing particularly on organisational efficiency in Human resources management and in External Communication as well as on staff perceptions in general. It includes...

EU decentralised agencies are submitted to some financial and administrative requirements initially established for the EU Institutions (e.g. arising from Staff Regulation, Financial Regulation). Given the size of most of them, a significant proportion of their staff is dealing with...

This Final Report presents the outcome of the “Thematic global evaluation of the Commission support to decentralisation processes”. The Evaluation was commissioned by the DG DEVCO Evaluation Unit and was implemented between January 2010 and February 2012. The purpose of the evaluation is to...

This guidance provides a comprehensive overview of the TALD analytical framework that is meant to help EU delegations assess the policy, institutional and technical capacity constraints affecting territorial development in a given context; and to determine where and how they can best intervene...