British Balance of Competence Reviews, Part I: ‘Competences about right, so far’. EPIN Working Paper No. 35, October 2013

The first in a series for a CEPS-EPIN project entitled “The British Question and the Search for a Fresh European Narrative” this paper is pegged on an ambitious ongoing exercise by the British government to review all the competences of the European Union. The intention is that this should provide a basis for informed debate before the referendum on the UK remaining in the EU or not, which is scheduled for 2017. This paper summarises the first six reviews, each of which runs to around 80 pages, covering foreign policy, development policy, taxation, the single market, food safety, and public health. The present authors then add their own assessments of these materials. While understandably giving due place to British interests, they are of general European relevance. The substantive conclusions of this first set of reviews are that the competences of the EU are judged by respondents to be ‘about right’ on the whole, which came as a surprise to eurosceptic MPs and the tabloid media. Our own view is that the reviews are objective and impressively researched, and these populist complaints are illustrating the huge gap between the views of informed stakeholders and general public opinion, and therefore also the hazard of subjecting the ‘in or out’ choice for decision by referendum. If the referendum is to endorse the UK’s continuing membership there will have to emerge some fresh popular narratives about the EU. The paper therefore concludes with some thoughts along these lines, both for the UK and the EU as a whole.

Why trying to keep the Germans close on EU competences is risky for Britain. EPIN Commentary No. 13, 3 December 2013

A new Commentary published by the European Policy Institutes Network (EPIN) offers an interesting piece of advice to the UK if it is to succeed in winning over Germany on EU reform. The author, Almut Möller, asserts that the UK needs to understand how Germany’s federal system, with its intricate balance of competences between the various levels, is an integral part of modern Germany and key to the country’s thinking on Europe.

The Dano case – Or time for the UK to digest realities about the balance of competences between the EU and national levels. CEPS Commentary, 14 November 2014

The European Court of Justice's new judgment on the Dano case should be reverberating around the UK. In Michael Emerson's view, it shows how national competences can be deftly used to control for 'benefit tourism' without challenging EU law, and that the Court is not acting as the agent of 'EU competence creep', as alleged in the Eurosceptic's stereotype.

A Contribution to The Study of Global Competition for Talent: the determinants of student mobility and its consequences for the internationalization of the labor market. Bruges European Economic Policy (BEEP) Briefing 27/2013

In a globalized economy the skills of the workforce are a key determinant of the competitiveness of a country. One of the goals of Higher Education is precisely to develop the students’ skills in order to allow them to match the increasing demand for highly qualified workers while it is simultaneously the best period of life to acquire multicultural skills. For this reason, the European Union has fostered student mobility through several programs: the Erasmus program and the Bologna process are the best known among them. Although student mobility is a growing phenomenon, publications and research on the subject remain relatively scarce. This paper aims to contribute to that literature through an empirical analysis which exploits a questionnaire submitted to university alumni and focuses on two research questions: what drives studies abroad and what drives expatriation of graduates. Our empirical analysis first shows that exposure to international experiences before entering tertiary education and family background are the main factors influencing student mobility. A second conclusion is that studying abroad increases the international mobility on the labor market. Both confirm previous studies. Moreover, by making a distinction between participating in the Erasmus program and in other exchange programs or internships abroad, we found that the Erasmus program and the other programs or internships have an equivalent influence on the international mobility on the labor market: they increase by 9 to 12.5 percentage points a student’s chance to be mobile on the international labor market. This result shows the legitimacy of the Erasmus program, but it also reveals the important impact of other forms of experience abroad. It provides support for policy makers to encourage mobility programs, in order to foster integration of the European labor market.

Labor Market Policy Decentralization in Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy - Dynamics and Reasons. ACES Working Papers No. 5, 2008

This article argues that welfare-to-work or activation policies, which have been adopted across a range of OECD countries during the last two decades, do not only have led to changes in the substance of the welfare state but also to transformations in its institutional configuration. This institutional transformation includes the spatial reconfiguration of the welfare state, which has given new roles to the supra-national, national, and sub-national levels of government as well as private actors in the management and creation of labor market policies. By bringing institutions into these debates, this article seeks to expand the literature on welfare-to-work and activation as to date authors working on this topic have said very little about the degree, types, and reasons for the spatial re-configuration of welfare-to-work policies across different states. To fill a gap in the literatures on changes in the welfare state and its territorial configuration in particular, we compare trends in the re-configuration of welfare-to-work policies in Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom. We find that there is a cross-national trend, when it comes to the institutional effects of the implementation of activation. These trends bear a tension between decentralization and centralization, as both central and sub-national levels of government have acquired new responsibilities to implement the activation paradigm.