The "European Yearbook" promotes the scientific study of European organisations and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Each volume contains a detailed survey of the history, structure and yearly activities of each organisation and an up-to-date chart providing a clear overview of the member states of each organisation. In addition, a number of articles on topics of general interest are included in each volume. A general index by subject and name, and a cumulative index of all the articles which have appeared in the "Yearbook," are included in every volume and provide direct access to the "Yearbook's" subject matter. Each volume contains a comprehensive bibliography covering the year's relevant publications. This is an indispensable work of reference for anyone dealing with the European institutions.
Socialist economies in Eastern Europe have collapsed and em- barked upon market-oriented reforms. The causes of the demise of centrally planned economies are analyzed and the basic challenges of systemic tranformation discussed. Negative income and wealth effects as well as distribution issues make adjustment extremely difficult. The fundamental roles of privatization and foreign investment are adressed. Foreign economic liberalization is considered to be of centralimportance for a growth-oriented adjustment path in a stage of conflict-prone policy and options. Politico-economic aspects of the new European developments in addition to North-South issues are analyzed. Difficult choices await decison-makers in economic policy and the business community in Eastern Europe and in leading market economies.
An Introduction to European Intergovernmental Organizations provides an up-to-date and accessible reference to European intergovernmental organizations other than the European Union. The EU is so dominant that people often overlook the multitude of older and newer, smaller and larger intergovernmental organizations rooted in the history of contemporary Europe which continue to help shape its future. The specialized character of these organizations adds value to cooperation in Europe as a whole, creates permanent channels of communication regardless of EU membership and allows the possibility for non-European involvement through organizations such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and NATO. It also allows sub regional groups of states, such as the Nordic countries or the Benelux countries to exist and express their own identity via their own organizations. This book looks at the history of Non-EU organizations, their decision-making characteristics, membership policies, legal powers actions and interactions with each other and the European Union. A uniform scheme of analysis is used to make European intergovernmental organizations comparable and by studying them we gain a deeper understanding and insight into European affairs.
This book undertakes a critical survey of art history across Europe, examining the recent conceptual and methodological concerns informing the discipline as well as the political, social and ideological factors that have shaped its development in specific national contexts.
In this volume an international team of scholars builds up a comprehensive analysis of the fiscal history of Europe over six centuries. It forms a fundamental starting-point for an understanding of the distinctiveness of the emerging European states, and highlights the issue of fiscal power as an essential prerequisite for the development of the modern state. The study underlines the importance of technical developments by the state, its capacity to innovate, and, however imperfect the techniques, the greater detail and sophistication of accounting practice towards the end of the period. New taxes had been developed, new wealth had been tapped, new mechanisms of enforcement had been established. In general, these developments were made in western Europe; the lack of progress in some fiscal systems, especially those in eastern Europe, is an issue of historical importance in its own right and lends particular significance to the chapters on Poland and Russia. By the eighteenth century `mountains of debt' and high debt-revenue ratios had become the norm in western Europe, yet in the east only Russia was able to adapt to the western model by 1815. The capacity of governments to borrow, and the interaction of the constraints on borrowing and the power to tax had become the real test of the fiscal powers of the `modern state' by 1800-15.
How can the concept of abuse of European Union law – which can be defined as undesirable choice of law artificially made by a private citizen – generate so much disagreement among equally intelligent individuals? Seeking to transcend the classical debate between its supporters and adversaries, the present study submits that the concept of abuse of EU law is located on three major fault-lines of EU law, which accounts for the well-established controversies in the field. The first fault-line, which is common to all legal orders, opposes legal congruence (the tendency to yield equitable legal outcomes) to legal certainty (the tendency to yield predictable legal outcomes). Partisans of legal congruence tend to advocate the prohibition of abuses of law, whereas partisans of legal certainty tend to oppose it. The second fault-line is specific to EU law and divides two conceptions of the regulation of the internal market. If economic integration is conceived as the promotion of cross-border competition among private businesses (the paradigm of 'regulatory neutrality'), choices of law must be proscribed as abusive, for they distort business competition. But if economic integration is intended to promote competition among Member States (the paradigm of 'regulatory competition'), choices of law by EU citizens represent a desirable process of arbitrage among national laws. The third and final fault-line corresponds to the tension between two orientations of the economic constitution of the European Union, namely the fear of private power and the fear of public power. Those who fear private power most tend to endorse the prohibition of abuses of law, whereas those who fear public power most tend to reject it. Seen in this way, the concept of abuse of EU law offers a forum in which fundamental questions about the nature and function of EU law can be confronted and examined in a new light. In May 2013, the thesis that this book was based on won the First Edition of the European Law Faculties Association Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis.
This text provides a source of citations to North American scholarships relating specifically to the area of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It indexes fields of scholarship such as the humanities, arts, technology and life sciences and all kinds of scholarship such as PhDs.
