What is wrong with Europe's Single Market? The brief answer to that question is that it does not really exist - it is unsingle. The Single Market is in many ways a political illusion. It exists only nominally. Any company doing business in Europe faces significant barriers to cross-border...

The EU agenda for improving competitiveness is missing in action. Economic competitiveness has been a central plank in the development of the European Union - a relentless quest for policies that lead to more prosperity and that make European companies in world markets more successful. However,...

In this paper, we will discuss how Europe makes digital policy and how its digital economic performance can be improved. The focus is on the D9+ initiative. Launched in 2016 on the initiative of former Swedish trade minister, Ann Linde, nine countries with a particular interest in matters of the...

Europe trails the global frontier of productivity growth and the region's trend is sluggish. Much prospective economic growth for Europe is likely to come from AI and its adoption by European firms which is projected to shoot up the productivity trend. For such AI-generated growth to work, high...

The EU Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) is proposing a far-reaching "European Cybersecurity Certification Scheme for Cloud Services" (EUCS) to be established in the European Union (EU). According to the latest draft of August 2023, leaked by Politico in September 2023, the...

In this study, we provide an overview of the recently established European Labour Authority (ELA), its goals and powers, before offering a preliminary analysis of ELA. In brief, ELA is an agency with the broad and important objective of improving the enforcement of mobile workers' rights in the...

In dieser Studie geben wir einen Überblick über die neue Europäische Arbeitsbehörde (ELA), ihre Ziele und Befugnisse, und nehmen eine erste Analyse der ELA vor. Die ELA hat einerseits das weitreichende und wichtige Ziel, die Rechte mobiler Arbeitnehmer*innen in der EU besser durchzusetzen,...

This paper develops a methodology to define functional rural areas in the EU. It seeks feedback on the method and the results. Functional rural areas cover all the territory outside functional urban areas. They are constructed in three steps. First, we define rural centres: they are the largest...

Wirtschaftlicher Zwang ist ein Mittel der Außenpolitik, welches in einem internationalen Umfeld, das geprägt ist von geopolitischen Spannungen und der Instrumentalisierung des Handels als Waffe, immer mehr an Bedeutung gewinnt. Solche Maßnahmen stellen auch für die EU ein zunehmendes Problem...