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The 2014 European elections led to a sharp rise in the electoral consensus of parties and independent parliament members perceived as eurosceptic. This paper analyzes the interconnections between distressed economies and the electoral success of hard-line eurosceptic parties. On a panel of 108 elections between 2008 and 2015, the random-effects model shows the relative effect of long- and short-term political trust, economic performance indicators, and institutional variables in determining the rise of hard-line eurosceptic parties. In contrast with previous studies, which have tended to de-emphasize the effect of economic performance in determining the success of eurosceptic forces, the results of this paper detect both a direct and a mediated effect of the economic crisis on the electoral success of hard-line eurosceptic parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: First embodied by the European Supervisory Authorities in 2010, agency governance in the financial sector has gained momentum with the creation of the Single Resolution Board (SRB) – an EU agency with considerable competencies in banking prudential policy. Within a short period, backed by the ‘ESMA‐Short Selling case’ judgment, agencies have progressed from supporting the European Commission with their quasi‐rule making, to a more prominent role in the decision‐making process, potentially influencing policy‐makers' agenda. By engaging in a qualitative analysis of legal documents, official texts and relevant scholarship, this research note examines the formal framework and practical aspects of SRB's governance, in order to substantiate whether its establishment presents a ‘qualitative increase’ in financial sector agencification. At the same time, the research note highlights problematic issues arising because of the limitations set by the Meroni doctrine arguing that the Board's wide powers ‘on paper’ may prove challenging to implement in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrant investor programmes (IIPs) - aimed at attracting investment in return for residency or citizenship for wealthy foreigners - have proliferated in EU Member States in recent years. Such schemes constitute part of a much broader commercialization of citizenship, which has intensified during the crisis. They have been particularly controversial in the EU because they rely for their attractiveness in part on the reality of EU citizenship and the rights of mobility and residence that it entails. The European Commission, among others, has presented them as threat to national citizenship and yet the EU at once champions a 'post-national' citizenship and is arguably culpable in the very commercialization of citizenship of which investor schemes are a stark manifestation. This paper unpacks the tensions in the theory and politics of investor migration in the recent EU context, arguing that they reveal what is termed a 'quadrilemma' at the heart of a multi-level citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Using quarterly data from 1995 until 2014, we investigate whether Euro Area (EA) membership influences the probability of a European Union Member State going through an episode of sudden stop or through an episode of bonanza, after controlling for a number of push and pull factors. Overall, our results do not support the claim that EA membership constituted a weakness during the recent financial crisis. On the contrary, we find that EA membership decreases the probability of a sudden stop, all else equal. We find no evidence that being part of the EA has a direct effect on the probability of bonanza. When allowing for interaction effects, our results suggest that EA membership might have mitigated the risk perception arising from higher government debt in the case of bonanzas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is secular stagnation - a period of persistently lower growth such as that seen following the financial crisis of 2008-09 - a valid concern for euro-area countries? We tackle this question using the well-established Laubach-Williams model to estimate the unobservable equilibrium real interest rate and compare it to the actual real rate. In light of the considerable increase in heterogeneity among EU member countries since the beginning of the financial crisis, we apply our approach to 12 euro-area countries to provide country-level answers to the question of secular stagnation. The presence of secular stagnation in a number of euro-area countries has important implications for ECB decision-making (such as, voting power in the Governing Council) and EU governance. Our results indicate that secular stagnation is not a significant threat to most euro-area countries, with one possible exception: Greece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic and financial crisis opened a window of opportunity to place the Single Market back on top of the European agenda as part of a two-tiered crisis response, which also included reinforced financial supervision and economic co-ordination. We argue that the Commission acted as a 'purposeful opportunist' in both tiers; but whereas in economic governance issues there was breakthrough change in the Commission's achievements and competences, in the Single Market realm policy change was fairly modest. Using process tracing analysis our goal is to explain why the Commission did not succeed in furthering a genuine Single Market reform. Our findings suggest that the Commission's entrepreneurship was constrained by the limited salience of Single Market issues in the crisis context and by the lack of actual political commitment from the other relevant stakeholders. Thus, our research highlights the limits of the Commission's opportunistic behaviour in less advantageous circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Euro Plus Pact was approved by the European Union countries in March 2011. The pact stipulates various measures to strengthen competitiveness with the ultimate aim of preventing accumulation of unsustainable external imbalances. This article uses Granger causality tests to assess the short-term linkages between changes in relative unit labour costs and changes in the current account balance for the period 1995-2011. The main finding is that changes in the current account balance precede changes in relative unit labour costs, while there is no discernible effect in the opposite direction. This suggests that capital flows from the European core to the periphery contributed to the divergence in unit labour costs across Europe prior to the global financial crisis. The results also suggest that the measures to restrain unit labour costs may have only limited effect on the current account balance in the short term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the financial crisis, negotiating free trade agreements ( FTAs) with Southeast Asia has become a priority for the European Union ( EU). Paradoxically, all the indications are that the EU will demand that Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand liberalize financial services trade with the EU. This article asks whether the EU's policy undermines coherence between EU trade and development policies. It argues that the EU and Association of Southeast Asian Nations ( ASEAN) agree that financial services are crucial for development, but that they differ on the approach to liberalization: the EU advocates broad-ranging liberalization, whereas ASEAN countries favour a cautious approach, conditioned by their experience of the Asian financial crisis. In view of this divergence, the EU will have to rethink its approach to financial services trade liberalization in negotiations with ASEAN countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents evidence that a significant part of the surge in the spreads of the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) countries in the eurozone during 2010-11 was disconnected from underlying increases in the debt-to-GDP (gross domestic product) ratios, and was the result of negative market sentiments that became very strong since the end of 2010. It is argued that the systematic mispricing of sovereign risk in the eurozone intensifies macroeconomic instability, leading to bubbles in good years and excessive austerity in bad years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: At this stage of European integration and given the high degree of Europe's politicization and salience caused by the recent global financial crisis, representative democracy in the EU can only function if parties mobilize beyond borders. We examine whether European Party Groups (EPG) in the European Parliament (EP) offer distinct policy alternatives and how coherent these are. We use party position data collected by two Voting Advice Applications designed for the 2009 and 2014 EP elections, respectively (EUProfiler and Euandi). We find evidence of competition between EPGs groups on both left right issues and European integration; on the latter issue, there is greater differentiation within the anti‐EU camp. Coherence within EPG exists, though it varies across issues, EPGs and between election years examined: it is greater on European integration than on left–right issues and it is particularly high for right wing eurosceptics though for most parties it deteriorates between 2009 and 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we discuss the concept of European solidarity by distinguishing between transnational and international solidarity. The former refers to support for institutional arrangements aimed at sharing economic risks at the individual level, while the latter entails public agreement to share economic risks at the Member State level. We explore the joint role of cross-border interactions and political attitudes in fostering solidarity ties among Europeans through multilevel modelling based on the 2012 Eurobarometer 77 survey. The article shows that transnational experiences do not have the same effect on different forms of European solidarity, limiting transnational and enhancing international solidarity. Egalitarian individuals are more prone to EU-wide solidarity, with cross-border practices affecting their level of solidarity, while not altering those of the rest of the population. In particular, we find that cross-border practices make egalitarians more inclined to international and less to transnational solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the three themes of the conundrum within the financial crisis in the European Union (EU) countries in 2015 such as democracy, conditionality and institutional weakness. Topics mentioned include the impact of the initiatives of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and EU conditionality on debt crisis in Greece, the effort started by Yanis Varoufakis, former Member of the Hellenic Parliament, with euro partners of Greece, and the response of EU Commission vice-president Jyrki Katainen to the election of the SYRIZA government, a left-wing political party in Greece, in Athens.

The bulk of the literature on 'social Europe' has suggested that social policy at the level of the EU remains to be characterized by the interplay of courts and markets. While we do not disagree with this argument, our objective is to shed light on the European Commission's entrepreneurship, an element which appears to be somewhat bereft of scholarly attention. We show how, by displaying social acuity, defining problems and building teams, the Commission has actively promoted a policy agenda focused on liberal market building at the expense of socially minded regulation. This was however only made possible by a new constellation among the Member States after 2004. We substantiate this claim by documenting the activity of the Commission in two crucial policy domains of the post-Lisbon era: the liberalization of service provision, and the impact of the new macro-economic governance on social policy after the financial and debt crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades a deep process of institutional reforms and economic reorganization took place in central and eastern EU countries (CEE). These changes occurred in a context of general economic integration. On the one hand, the European Union enlargement programme was launched and all CEE countries applied to become EU member between 1994 and 1996. On the other hand, the globalization of the world economy characterized this historical phase. This article explores to what extent openness to global markets mediated the impact of EU integration on the economic performance of CEE regions in different periods. The periods examined are defined by the main institutional changes that occurred on the road towards EU integration. Results show that globally open regions performed better than the others, at least in the first two periods analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the implications of the financial crisis for the relationship between monetary integration and democratic government in the European Union ( EU). As the crisis has exposed the original balance that economic and monetary union ( EMU) sought to maintain between monetary integration and policy diversity to be unsustainable, the eurozone is put before the choice of one of three governance models: executive federalism, democratic federalization or EMU dissolution. Notably, these three governance models perfectly illustrate Dani Rodrik's 'trilemma of the world economy', which maintains that of the three goods - economic (and monetary) integration, the nation-state and democratic politics - one will always have to give. In light of this, the article concludes that the present course towards executive federalism can be justified for preventing euro dissolution and recognizing the value of national self-government. Nevertheless, it threatens to come at a democratic price. Hence, it is imperative to consider possible flanking measures that can mitigate this effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives European Union ( EU) policy change in a sensitive and contentious area? To answer this question, this article tells the story of corporate social responsibility ( CSR) in the EU from its beginnings until the present. The EU's role in EU CSR has changed from social-liberal standard-setter to neo-liberal cheerleader and back. This article attempts to explain these shifts. It argues that Europe's institutional diversity hampers standard-setting while economic crises and declining levels of business legitimacy facilitate it. Contention has been fuelled by CSR's inherent ambiguity: is CSR a means to regulate the economy, or a domain of voluntary activity that must remain free of state regulation? Fearful of regulation, business groups - German employers in particular - have forcefully advocated the latter view. In addition to converting EU CSR from social-liberal to neo-liberal, business has neutralized two of the Commission's standard-setting advocates. The financial crisis, the power of arguments and discourse, and the impact of global policy developments in the field of CSR have re-empowered standard-setters. The article concludes with a critical analysis of the EU's renewed CSR strategy and non-financial reporting agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the claims of the small states literature on the importance of alliance formation. It applies it to the case of Ireland and Iceland and asks whether membership of the EU and euro in Ireland and the absence of these in Iceland had a say in their reduction of risk before the financial crisis, assistance in absorbing the shock of their crash and help in recovering after it. The article argues that the notion of shelter needs to take more account of domestic arrangements and the shelter's costs though the cases confirm the importance of alliance formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Employment Strategy (EES) emerged in the early 1990s under the influence of an acute rise in unemployment and the introduction of economic and monetary union (EMU). Its purpose is to foster convergence towards lower unemployment and higher employment. This article considers these outcomes over a longer time frame and in a broader geographical context than previous studies have done. Overall, outcomes in the EU-15 improved and converged since the introduction of EES. Comparisons suggest that these developments do not merely reflect long-term or international trends. The recent crisis, with deteriorating and divergent outcomes, might signal the start of a new EES cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are EU Member States converging in terms of their innovative effort? To what extent is the current economic downturn impairing the convergence across the European Union countries in innovation performance? Using macro and micro data, this article shows that the EU Member States have converged in their innovative potential over the 2004-08 period. The economic crisis of Autumn 2008 has an impact on innovative investment in almost all EU countries, but the catch-up countries are the most affected, leading to increasing divergence. The danger of growing disparities in innovative capabilities may lead to divergence also in income and well-being. The article discusses some of the innovation policies that can be carried out at the EU level to facilitate cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An article is presented that reports on economic conditions in Europe and the European Union (EU) in 2009. The article discusses internal market legislation in the EU in terms of economic decline and the 2008-2009 global financial crisis as related to areas including government bailouts, credit, and banking. The financial instability and recession are being addressed in the European market through innovation and government reinforcement. Information is provided on trade flows, legislative regulations, and investment management, as well as on the European Commission and European Parliament.

The article discusses the European Union's (EU) relations with the global community since the Lisbon Treaty signing in October 2007. The EU's foreign, security and defence policy, common commercial trade policy, development cooperation policy and humanitarian aid are explored. The EU's relations with Asia, Africa, Russia, Latin America, and Japan are outlined. The "transatlantic economic partnership" between the EU and the U.S. as well as U.S. preoccupations with presidential elections, the Doha Development Round trade negotiations, and the sub-prime mortgage financial crisis are discussed.