Two Greek economic analysts explain the Greek financial crisis—from beginning to end. The first section of Greece: From Exit to Recovery? explores the lead up to to Greece’s adoption of the euro. Authors Theodore Pelagidis and Michael Mitsopoulos believe that the ensuing challenges were foreseeable. In fact, the authors posit that it was Greece’s difficultly in dealing with those challenges that sparked the euro crisis. Section II analyzes discrete sectors of the economy, paying special attention to labor and finance—and the mistakes creditors made in focusing on reducing Greek incomes—rather than increasing competitiveness on non-labor costs. Section III investigates why Greek companies spend relatively little on research and development.? The authors’ analysis indicates that policy decisions largely determine R&D performance in the private sector, and they advance a number of specific policy proposals to improve the situation.
This 2002 edition of OECD's periodic review of the Euro Area economy examines recent economic developments, policies and prospects and includes special features on the fiscal policy framework, monetary management, financial market integration, and the EU's policy processes.
[The authors'] analysis is thought-provoking, ... offers thoughtful reading and is well-written and engaging. Open Citizenship In contrast to most books on EU citizenship this book is a page-turner until the end. I found myself varyingly intrigued, annoyed, and challenged. This is what a book should be. It is provocative, almost polemical, and should get noticed. Above all, I believe that there is room-indeed an overwhelming need for-a variety of books on these topics that challenge rather than replicate each other. Randall Hansen, University of Toronto This volume offers an intriguing, thought-provoking argument, linking the neo-liberalization of many EU policy developments (via the Single European Market and the Lisbon Agenda) to an ever more restrictive conceptualization of 'European citizenship' à la Maastricht... The subfield of EU studies has become so over-specialized that we could really use more texts of this nature linking contradictory policy domains and national vs. supranational currents. Joyce Mushaben, University of Missouri-St.Louis ...the book offers important insights into the contradictions and limits of the current integration project and how these limits might be transcended in order to come to a more veritable realisation of the citizenship ideal within the European Union. Highly recommended for any student of European governance and European political economy. Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Department of Political Science, VU University Amsterdam As the European Union faces the ongoing challenges of legitimacy, identity, and social cohesion, an understanding of the social purpose and direction of EU citizenship becomes increasingly vital. This book is the first of its kind to map the development of EU citizenship and its relation to various localities of EU governance. From a critical political economy perspective, the authors argue for an integrated analysis of EU citizenship, one that considers the interrelated processes of migration, economic transformation, and social change and the challenges they present. Peo Hansen is Political Scientist and Associate Professor at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) at Linköping University, Sweden. His publications include Europeans Only? Essays on Identity Politics and the European Union (Umeå University, 2000) and Migration, Citizenship, and the European Welfare State: A European Dilemma, co-authored with Carl-Ulrik Schierup and Stephen Castles (Oxford University Press, 2006). Sandy Brian Hager is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at York University, Toronto. His research interests and publications have focused on the political economy of welfare restructuring in the European Union, and more recently, on capital theory, global finance, and geopolitics.
Greece's economy symbolizes in many ways the Eurozone's economic problems and divergent interests as it amasses most of the economic disadvantages characterizing the Eurozone's economy itself. This book presents the economic and political challenges to Greece and the EU member states.
Büchs analyses the goals and instruments of the Open Method of Coordination, discusses approaches which theorize its functioning, examines its policy content and develops a framework for its evaluation. Through the examination of a case study the author demonstrates how policy actors apply the OMC in employment in Germany and the United Kingdom.
This book originates from the research project 'New discourses in labour law' held at the European University Institute. A detailed analysis of part-time work regulation is presented for seven European countries, in order to ascertain how internal domestic choices of the legislatures have merged into the 'Open method of co-ordination'. The impact of European employment policies is considered in parallel with the implementation of the Directive on part-time work, thus providing a complete overview of both soft and hard law mechanisms available to national policy-makers. In this 2004 work, the interaction between law and policy emerges as a dynamic and constantly changing process of exchange between national and supranational actors, through the use of concrete examples of lawmaking. Labour law is put forward as being central in the current evolution of European law, and this centrality is presented as a confirmation of innovation and continuity in regulatory techniques.
This book examines fiscal policy coordination in EMU and the required adjustments to national fiscal policies by EMU member states. The book shows that, in the process of Europeanization, national interests have had a major impact on the formation of fiscal policy coordination.
The policies of the European Union profoundly affect the lives of people in Europe and around the world. The new edition of this highly successful textbook outlines how and why such decisions are made, as well as the key challenges faced by policy-makers in the current political and economic climate. Policy-Making in the European Union begins by clarifying the institutional framework of the EU and the analytical approaches used to understand it. A wide range of crucial and illustrative policies are then explored in detail by subject experts. This volume includes new chapters on ways of analyzing the EU's policy process and on energy policy. A central theme to the volume is how the recent expansion to twenty-seven member states has affected policy-making across the different policy sectors. The conclusion reflects on how this challenge and the protracted constitutional stalemate have affected policy-making in the EU. It also explores the impact of the financial and economic crises that have struck Europe over the past several years. The sixth edition is fully up-to-date, and is the ideal text for all those with an interest in the policy-making of the European Union.
This book provides an original and wide-ranging analysis of the impact of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) on economic governance in the EU and in several key Member States within and outside the Euro area. Its emphasis is on adaptation: how EMU encourages change in national and EU institutions and in national economic regimes. It brings together economic, political science and legal perspectives to explain how national economies adapted, the dynamics of policy-making and the complex web of laws, processes and actors in the EMU.
With a focus on how directly the conditions of access to employment are modified by EU legislation and case law, this important book critically analyses the mandate by which the EU constrains domestic competences to regulate access to labour markets. The author identifies an ‘EU public-social order approach’ – a set of norms imposed by EU institutions on domestic authorities in the performance of a task with social implications. In the area of access to labour markets, this approach is characterized by the following measures and objectives: prohibition of certain forms of discrimination in access to employment, which enhances the protection of individuals; facilitation of the cross-border allocation of workforce among Member States, which requires domestic decision-makers to give equal chances to all EU citizens; and promotion of the economic competitiveness of domestic labour markets, which affects the rights of third country nationals. The presentation assesses the effectiveness of this public-social order approach – in particular as revealed in ECJ case law – as a tool to increase economic efficiency, advance distributive justice, and ensure protection of dignity. By way of detailed example, the author examines reforms of employment contract law and economic migration law in France, and for purposes of comparison illustrates parallel movements in defining the principle of equality as manifested in U.S. law. Thorough and incisive, this analysis of the constraints imposed by EU law on the exercise by domestic institutions of their competence in regulating labour markets is valuable not only to lawyers and academics in employment law, but also of great interest to jurists and policymakers in the wider field of European law as an accurate overview of the tensions between EU constraints and the tools used by national policy makers.
