Recent Changes in European Welfare State Services: A Comparison of Child Care Politics in the U.K., Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands. CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No. 07.6, 1997

This paper examines recent policies and politics of services, in particular child care services in European welfare states. It is argued that social (care) services are becoming an increasingly political issue in postindustrial societies and are at the very center of welfare-state restructuring. Some countries have recently developed new policy pro­ grams for child care-but there are important differences among these programs. To understand these differences as well as some common features, the paper argues that it is necessary to examine the institutional organization of child care and short-term political factors as well as the rationales articulated in political debates to support or im­ pede various policies. The paper concludes that a comprehensive system of child care provisions is still far off in most countries, despite a rhetoric of choice and postindustrial care and labor-market patterns.

Will the PRIPs' KID live up to its promise to protect investors? ECMI Commentary No. 33, 6 July 2012

Unveiled by the European Commission on July 3rd, the proposed Regulation on key information documents (KID) for packaged retail investment products (PRIPs) represents a step forward in enhancing the protection of retail investors and advancing the single market for financial services. While acknowledging in this Commentary that the KID is a commendable effort, ECMI/CEPS researcher Mirzha de Manuel Aramendía observes that pre-contractual disclosure is just one of the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle of investor protection and regrets that other pieces, such as MiFID and the IMD, are not so ambitiously constructed.