This article analyses the parliamentary debates and decision-making related to the highly contentious EU directive on services. It is intended as a contribution to the academic debate on political conflict lines in the European Parliament. Our argument is that neither the left-right cleavage nor...

Prudential supervision is dealt with here as a matter of both regulation and control on a global or a regional level of the international activities of the various financial « industries ». While an analysis of the underlying rationale of prudential supervision is not within the ambit of the...

Since 1989 and the regionalization of public transports in Belgium, the Société des transports intercommunaux de Bruxelles (STIB), i.e. the public operator of urban transport in Brussels, has undergone many changes, both structural and organizational. Meanwhile, the company has managed to...

Is a competitive free market the most efficient way to maximize welfare and to equally allocate rare resources among economic agents? Economists usually tend to think this is the case. This paper presents a preliminary attempt through an object-oriented multi-agent model to address this...

The conventional academic rationale for supranational intervention to curb state aids to industry appeals to transfrontier spillovers. However, competition policy practitioners often speak in terms of curbing "wasteful" spending, regardless of whether or not any international spillovers are...