No later than last week, the Hungarian and Romanian prime ministers have both asked the EU officials to speed up their respective countries’ accession to the eurozone. After years of neglecting structural reforms in favour of stimulating domestic consumption, these countries, Poland and the Czech Republic are particularly hard hit in the current crisis. Their [...]

1. Introduction: the topic
• In the 1990s, many EU countries were faced with high and persistent unemployment. Due to the combined effect of strong GDP growth, eastward expansion of the EU and structural reforms in some Member States, the performance of European labour markets has improved considerably over the past few years. This was reflected in [...]
 

Introduction
In the developed world, immigration policies have had mixed success. Migrations have been accepted and even encouraged as an economic and demographic necessity, but the failure of developed societies to integrate migrants has also led to social tensions and to a public backlash that populist politicians have successfully exploited in many countries. Whereas business tends [...]

Probably you could rightly claim that the Baltic Republics with their strong economic, cultural and historic ties to Scandinavia and Russia are different, and modern Poland is indeed a mix of everything, but I think the CEE phrase, as well as Central Europe and Eastern Europe will remain useful in the next few centuries. With [...]

Considerable public funding goes into research. To the dismay, though, of many, European countries in the main are very poor at commercialising this research, and thus return of this public investment is often zero euros.
Reasons lie in at least two places:
EU member states (outside of the ‘anglo’ tradition) tend to ‘own’ their own research [...]

The international community is busy negotiating new C02 reduction targets for 2013-2020. There is agreement that these ought to be much tougher than those for 1990-2010.  For the developed countries the ambition is for a 25-40 cut over 1990. That is a tall order! 
The risk is therefore high that governments will take commitments without having [...]

Briefing Note For Workshop VII
This Briefing Note has been prepared for Workshop VII of the 2009 European Business Summit. The workshop will run between 15.45 and 17.00 on Thursday 26th March 2009. This Briefing Note has been prepared by the Hedge Fund Group.
The workshop will be moderated by Euronews and will include the following speakers:
Tayfun [...]

 
 
Here are the first results of the Poznan  EU AND THE WORLD convention on Common Foreign and Security Policy. Please feel free to react, take part and leave your comments!!
 
-         To have a strong and visible external policy, internal policy has to be unified.
-         If the EU wants to develop CFSP, citizens should be informed [...]

Briefing Note For Opening Plenary Session
This briefing note has been prepared by INSEAD for the Opening Pleanary Session at the 2009 EBS. The session will run between 11.15 and 12.30 on Thursday 26th March 2009. The session will be moderated by Frank Brown, Dean, INSEAD.
Other speakers at this session will include:
Prof Jagdish Bhagwati, Professor, Columbia [...]

This post was first published in TH!NK ABOUT IT site 25th February 2009.
During last twenty years war for humanitarian reasons has came quite popular in political vocabulary e.g. in Balkans and now with Georgia case. The ideal to use power in the service of ethics is good. The problem is the low level of [...]
 

Hier soir, petit débat autour de Benoît Hamon à la République des Blogs en compagnie d’Eric et de Pierre à l’invitation de Jules. Etant moins studieux, je ne vais pas faire un compte-rendu aussi détaillé que celui de Pierre qui a noirci des kilomètres de pages pendant tout le débat. Simplement pour dire que l’on [...]

China’s role in resolving the current financial and economic crisis is vital, and so therefore is the EU-China relationship.  The European Parliament has a history of highly critical resolutions on China, usually focusing on Tibet and human rights and Taiwan.  It rarely debates the broader aspects of the relationship.  However, Parliament is an important player, [...]

In the next few days the European Commission will tell us how Europe’s regulatory regime for financial services should be reformed in the aftermath of the credit crisis. As a starting point the Commission has the report from Jacques de Larosière’s taskforce, which was commissioned by President Barroso last October and published earlier this week.
No [...]

Work more, to earn more, to waste more, to borrow more, to work more. Until death happens.
In short, that’s how the dogma of growth translates, for most of us.
What has growth ever meant to us ?
More cement. More towers. More motorways. More cars.
More gadgets. More loans. More screens. More bureaucracy.
‘More’ being intrinsically enough to [...]

Is this fine by the Flemish government appropriate?
As of January 2009, all new residential houses in Flanders must be audited by the Flemish Energy Agency (VEA). This is to ensure that energy use is kept within appropriate limits. Houses are rated according to their so-called E-level, which must be less than 100 to receive [...]
 

France and Italy have signed an agreement on closer cooperation in the nuclear field. It will allow Italy to benefit from long French experience and accelerate its return to nuclear power generation after Chernobyl in 1986.
But it will take until 2020, before any of the new reactors planned to be built jointly with EDF will [...]

Declan Ganley, the founder and main financier of the eurosceptic Libertas party and the man behind the Irish No-Lisbon campaign, have been touring Central Europe for political allies and recruiting local politicians for the Libertas party lists with mixed results.
 

If I could change one thing in Europe, what would YOU change?

If I could change one thing in Europe, what would YOU change?

On his blog, Daniel Pink is writing about the CNN poll that is finding, that people have a much more positive view on their personal situation than on the state of economy in general. And concludes:
If enough people think everyone else is doomed, eventually they’ll doom themselves.
How true. A Eurobarometer study reports the same story [...]