The European Parliament: it has to do with you. European Policy Brief No. 25, March 2014

In the City, the citizen is king. At least theoretically. In the European City currently being built around twenty eight national democracies, the citizen will soon be called upon, in May, to democratically elect his or her representative in the European Parliament for the next five years. Since the very first election of Members of the European Parliament by direct universal suffrage in 1979, spectacular progress has been made by the “European Economic Community” that we now all know as the European Union. And the powers vested in citizen representatives are equally impressive. But there is a real possibility that European citizens will turn their backs on the upcoming European elections like never before. Why?

You'd better bet on the ETS. Bruegel Policy Brief 2013/02, April 2013

The issue: The European Union's emissions trading system (ETS), introduced in 2005, is the centerpiece of EU decarbonisation efforts and the biggest emissions trading scheme in the world. After a peak in May 2008, the price of ETS carbon allowances started to collapse, and industry, civil society and policymakers began to think about how to ‘repair the ETS’. However, the ETS is an effective and efficient tool to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and although prices have not been stable, it has evolved to cover more sectors and greenhouse gases, and to become more robust and less distorting. Prices are depressed because of an interplay of fundamental factors and a lack of confidence in the system. Policy challenge The ETS must be stabilised by reinforcing the credibility of the system so that the use of existing low-carbon alternatives (for example burning gas instead of coal) is incentivised and investment in low-carbon assets is ensured. Further-more, failure to reinvigorate the ETS might compromise the cost-effective synchronisation of European decarbonisation efforts across sectors and countries. To restore credibility and to ensure long-term commitment to the ETS, the European Investment Bank should auction guarantees on the future emission allowance price.This will reduce the risk for low-carbon investments and enable stabilisation of the ETS until a compromise is found on structural measures to reinforce it in order to achieve the EU's long-term decarbonisation targets.

Putin’s grand design to destroy the EU’s Eastern Partnership and replace it with a disastrous neighbourhood policy of his own. CEPS Commentary, 17 September 2013

This new Commentary by Michael Emerson and Hrant Kostanyan shows how the pressure exerted by President Putin on Armenia to withdraw from the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement it had negotiated with the EU and to join the Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia customs union is but the most recent in a long series of ongoing moves by Russia to destroy the Eastern Partnership. In their view, the message to be hammered home to those unsure of the economic arguments is that you do not have to have an exclusive customs union to enjoy deep integration for goods, services, people and capital, and of course even less for hard security relationships. High-quality free trade agreements are the logical instrument for those who want excellent relations with more than one big neighbour.

Why the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) is bad for you: a letter to the EU. Research Papers in Law, 5/2006

From the Introduction. The aim of the present “letter” is to provoke, rather than to prove. It is intended to further stimulate the – already well engaged – scientific dialogue on the open method of coordination (OMC).1 This explains why some of the arguments put forward are not entirely new, while others are overstretched. This contribution, belated as it is entering into the debate, has the benefit of some hindsight. This hindsight is based on three factors (in chronological order): a) the fact that the author has participated himself as a member of a national delegation in one of the OMC-induced benchmarking exercises (only to see the final evaluation report getting lost in the Labyrinth of the national bureaucracy, despite the fact that it contained an overall favorable assessment), as well as in a OECD led exercise of coordination, concerning regulatory reform; b) the extremely rich and knowledgeable academic input, offering a very promising theoretical background for the OMC; and c) some recent empirical research as to the efficiency of the OMC, the accounts of which are, to say the least, ambiguous. This recent empirical research grounds the basic assumption of the present paper: that the OMC has only restricted, if not negligible, direct effects in the short term, while it may have some indirect effects in the medium-long term (2). On the basis of this assumption a series of arguments against the current “spread” of the OMC will be put forward (3). Some proposals on how to neutralize some of the shortfalls of the OMC will follow (4).

With or without you...judging politically in the field of Area of Freedom, Security and Justice? Research Papers in Law, 3/2007

From the Introduction. The study of the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) case law of the regarding the Area of Freedom Security and Justice (AFSJ) is fascinating in many ways.1 First, almost the totality of the relevant case law is extremely recent, thereby marking the first ‘foundational’ steps in this field of law. This is the result of the fact that the AFSJ was set up by the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997 and only entered into force in May 1999.2 Second, as the AFSJ is a new field of EU competence, it sets afresh all the fundamental questions – both political and legal – triggered by European integration, namely in terms of: a) distribution of powers between the Union and its member states, b) attribution of competences between the various EU Institutions, c) direct effect and supremacy of EU rules, d) scope of competence of the ECJ, and e) measure of the protection given to fundamental rights. The above questions beg for answers which should take into account both the extremely sensible fields of law upon which the AFSJ is anchored, and the EU’s highly inconvenient three-pillar institutional framework.3 Third, and as a consequence of the above, the vast majority of the ECJ’s judgments relating to the AFSJ are a) delivered by the Full Court or, at least, the Grand Chamber, b) with the intervention of great many member states and c) often obscure in content. This is due to the fact that the Court is called upon to set the foundational rules in a new field of EU law, often trying to accommodate divergent considerations, not all of which are strictly legal.4 Fourth, the case law of the Court relating to the AFSJ, touches upon a vast variety of topics which are not necessarily related to one another. This is why it is essential to limit the scope of this study. The content of, and steering for, the AFSJ were given by the Tampere European Council, in October 1999. According to the Tampere Conclusions, the AFSJ should consist of four key elements: a) a common immigration and asylum policy, b) judicial cooperation in both civil and penal matters, c) action against criminality and d) external action of the EU in all the above fields. Moreover, the AFSJ is to a large extent based on the Schengen acquis. The latter has been ‘communautarised’5 by the Treaty of Amsterdam and further ‘ventilated’ between the first and third pillars by decisions 1999/435 and 1999/436.6 Judicial cooperation in civil matters, mainly by means of international conventions (such as the Rome Convention of 1981 on the law applicable to contractual obligations) and regulations (such as (EC) 44/20017 and (EC) 1348/20008) also form part of the AFSJ. However, the relevant case law of the ECJ will not be examined in the present contribution.9 Similarly, the judgments of the Court delivered in the course of Article 226 EC proceedings against member states, will be omitted.10 Even after setting aside the above case law and notwithstanding the fact that the AFSJ only dates as far back as May 1999, the judgments of the ECJ are numerous. A simple (if not simplistic) categorisation may be between, on the one hand, judgments which concern the institutional setting of the AFSJ (para. 2) and, on the other, judgments which are related to some substantive AFSJ policy (para. 3).

A flexible, scaleable approach to the international patent 'name game'. Bruegel Working Paper 2014/10i, September 2014

The inventors in PATSTAT are often duplicates: the same person or company may be split into multiple entries in PATSTAT, each associated to different patents. In this paper, we address this problem with an algorithm that efficiently de-duplicates the data. It needs minimal manual input and works well even on consumer-grade computers. Comparisons between entries are not limited to their names, and thus this algorithm is an improvement over earlier ones that required extensive manual work or overly cautious clean-up of the names.