Recent wave of mass popular dissent reminds us that it is necessary to understand social dynamics also from the perspective of social exclusion. Landauer (1900) inquired how to create alternative community with “the inclusion of the excluded as excluded” (Agamben, 1999). Antisystem movements...

This contribution investigates the form and content of a new and updated European Union (EU) legal framework intended to regulate third-country import pipelines for gas, including the ‘upstream' component of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The article will first set the scene and examine the...

With the passage of Act 48 in May 2011, Vermont has become the first U.S. state to enact a law for a universal, publicly financed health care system. The state is on course for implementing a single payer system by 2017. This first breakthrough in the decades-long struggle for universal health...

Energy use is intertwined with environmental harms, climate, and economic development. However, the United States has failed to balance these interests together to make effective policy that can address each of these issues. The need for such integrative policy has become more and more obvious...

Economists from centuries have been leading discussions on the role of state in economy. Some of them are in favour of state’s wide interference in economy while others seek to limit the role of the government. One of the arguments for the necessity of state interventionism in the market...

This contribution develops a theory on the impact of differentiation on integration and unity among EU member states and discusses empirical evidence from four policy areas. According to the theory, the centripetal effects of closer cooperation among willing EU members on initially unwilling...

This paper presents a model of nation formation in which culturally heterogeneous agents vote on the optimal level of public spending. Larger nations benefit from increasing returns in the provision of public goods, but bear the costs of greater cultural heterogeneity. This tradeoff induces...

For 1990-2019, this study presents two-step GMM estimates of EU members' demands for defense spending based on alternative spatial-weight matrices. In particular, EU spatial connectivity is tied to EU membership status, members' contiguity, contiguity and power projection, inverse distance, and...

In this paper, the authors analyze the behavior of local governments on capital taxation when the financial choices in terms of a public good quality are done by a central planner. More specifically, they ask the question whether a local government has an interest to tax the mobile factor in...

The financial trilemma states that financial stability, financial integration and national financial policies are incompatible. Any two of the three objectives can be combined but not all three; one has to give. This paper develops a model to underpin the financial trilemma. Our findings for...