The EU's Group-to-Group Dialogue with the Southern Mediterranean and ASEAN – How much have they achieved? A Comparative Analysis. EU Centre Singapore Working Paper No, 18, December 2013

Four decades of the EU's group-to-group dialogues with the Southern Mediterranean grouping of countries and with ASEAN have produced different dynamics and outcomes, despite the EU’s common strategy to use economic soft power to achieve their goals for the partnerships. Diverging conditions in the two regions created inconsistency in the EU's application of the common approach. The EU's neighbourhood security concerns forced it to relax its political stand with their Southern Mediterranean partners. For ASEAN, geographical distance dilutes the EU’s security concerns it that region and has afforded the EU to be more ideological and assertive on democracy and human rights practices. These issues have provoked disagreements in EU-ASEAN dialogues, but both sides have also tried to remain pragmatic in order to achieve some progress in the partnership. In contrast, the protracted the Arab-Israeli conflict continues to hamper the Euro-Mediterranean dialogue, resulting in little progress. Social upheavals in the Southern Mediterranean also brought their partnership to a standstill. The EU's cooperation with former authoritarian regimes like Libya and Syria have only caused damage to its credibility in the Southern Mediterranean, and future Euro-Mediterranean dialogues are likely to be affected by it.

A Comparative Analysis of Regulations on Involuntary Loss of Nationality in the European Union. CEPS Liberty and Security in Europe, 75/December 2014

This study examines the workings of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), in order to assess the need and potential for new approaches to ensure access to protection for people seeking it in the EU, including joint processing and distribution of asylum seekers. Rather than advocating the addition of further complexity and coercion to the CEAS, the study proposes a focus on front-line reception and streamlined refugee status determination, in order to mitigate the asylum challenges facing Member States, and vindicate the rights of asylum seekers and refugees according to the EU acquis and international legal standards. Joint processing could contribute to front-line reception and processing capacity, but is no substitute for proper investment in national systems. The Dublin system as currently configured leads inexorably to increasing coercion and detention, and must thus be reconfigured to remove coercion as a principle and ensure consistency with human rights and other fundamental values of the EU.

Extending Working Lives: A comparative analysis of how governments influence lifelong learning, CEPS Special Report No. 111, July 2015

This report offers a comparative policy study on adult learning within the scope of complementary research conducted by Beblavý et al. (2013) on how people upgrade their skills during their adult lifetimes. To achieve our objectives, we identified regulatory policies and financial support in 11 countries for two main categories of learning: formal higher education and employer-based training. Drawing upon the results of the country reports carried out by our partners in the MoPAct project, we found that in none of the countries examined is there an ‘older student’ policy. In most cases grants and financial support are awarded only up until a certain age. In all of the countries studied, standard undergraduate and post-graduate studies are available for part-time students. The distribution of full-time students and part-time students in tertiary education varies from one country to another as well as from one age group to another. The participation in full-time tertiary education programmes decreases with the age of students. In Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and the UK, there are no mandatory policies to ensure employer-based training. However, in Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, employer-based training is more clearly regulated and the employers might have obligations to provide training for their staff. Taking into consideration Beblavý et al. (2013), we observe that comparative differences across countries can be related to policy differences only in some cases. The policy framework seems to impact more the employer-based training than the educational attainment (upgrade of ISCED level). In Denmark, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic and Poland, we find a perfect match between policy outcomes and the results of Beblavý et al. (2013) related to employer-based training. This is not the case in the United Kingdom, where the two aspects observed are not correlated.