The European single market in electricity has been promoted vigorously by the European Commission since 1996. We discuss how national electricity markets and cross-border electricity markets have ...been reshaped by the process. We examine the Commission’s own work on evaluating the benefits of the single market. We look at the wider evidence of impact on prices, security of supply, the environment, and innovation. We conclude that the institutional changes are extensive and there has been significant market harmonisation and integration. However, the measured benefits are difficult to identify, but likely to be small. This is partly because over the same period there has been a large rise in subsidised renewable generation that is driven by the decarbonisation agenda.
•The readiness of EU countries for Industry 4.0 was measured from Eurostat data.•Data revealed how infrastructure and big data capabilities coexist across countries.•Five homogeneous groups of ...countries were found, with large disparities among them.•There is a need for the collection of more detailed data on Industry 4.0 concepts.
Industry 4.0 is a concept that represents the adoption by industrial companies of techniques and processes allowed by digitization, cloud computing, the internet of things and big data to gain competitive advantages in domestic and global markets. Measuring how the manufacturing sector is adopting Industry 4.0 is challenging, given that there is not a closed definition of the term and that the collection of information is not specifically directed to Industry 4.0 concepts. Recognizing these difficulties, the present study measures the presence of the factors that characterize Industry 4.0 in manufacturing across EU countries. The analysis provides evidence that the existence of a digital infrastructure combined with the analytical capabilities to deal with big data emerge as the two dimensions that show the readiness for Industry 4.0 in each country. At EU level, five homogeneous groups of countries were found, showing large disparities across countries. The implementation of the single digital market strategy with regard to the manufacturing sector demands the collection of more detailed information on Industry 4.0.
There is a consensus over Europe’s transformation into a highly competitive economy through a series of ambitious pro-competition reforms. However, both the European Commission and national actors ...have legislative authority over competition policies. Thus, who are the critical actors behind this legislative and economic transformation in this multi-level system? Focusing on the liberalization of state-owned industries and using a staggered difference-in-differences approach, the paper shows that the effectiveness of European directives in decreasing firm-level market power increased with the extent of preceding domestic pro-competition reforms. For every unit increase of the early domestic reform index, EU directives decrease market power in liberalized industries by an additional 7.8%. However, this effect is not significant in countries that did not reform their industries ex-ante. This finding contradicts the established view in the literature identifying the Commission as the dominant force driving this transformation, which implemented ambitious reforms by often overcoming the resistance of reluctant national governments. Instead, it is shown that the effectiveness of the Commission’s reforms depends on the support of domestic actors and compatible national institutions.
This paper analyses the policy developments concerning the Single Market in finance in the context of Brexit. Theoretically, we engage with two bodies of work that make contrasting predictions on ...European financial market integration and the development of European Union (EU) policies on financial regulation: one focused upon a neo-mercantilist 'battle' amongst member states and the other stressing the importance of transnational financial networks (or coalitions). Empirically, we find limited evidence of the formation of cross-national alliances in favour of the United Kingdom (UK) retaining broad access to the EU Single Market in financial services, the presence of which would have aligned with the expectations of analyses focused upon transnational networks. By contrast, the main financial centres in the EU27 and their national authorities competed to lure financial business away from the UK - what we explain in terms of a 'battle' amongst member states and their national financial centres.
Against the backdrop of the ever‐increasing importance of digital services, the European Union (EU) is promoting deepening of its digital single market (DSM). Whilst the single market has often been ...portrayed as the Trojan horse of neoliberalism, recent rhetoric on digital sovereignty indicates a desire for more control over the digital sphere. A historical case study of key elements of the DSM, namely digital services regulation and data protection, shows that EU governance has become less market‐liberal and more public‐interventionist. In response to challenges associated with the digital economy, policy goals have been broadened to include further objectives in addition to competitiveness. Stakeholders and public authorities rather than business actors have become more important in governance processes, and more market‐correcting instruments have been introduced. These reforms have been made by adding more interventionist elements and also by redirecting the role of the European Commission to overseeing very large online platforms.
This special volume collects contributions from leading scholars who scrutinize the challenges digital finance presents for the EU internal market and financial market regulation from multiple public ...policy perspectives. Author contributions aim to provide policy-relevant research and ideas shedding light on the complexities of the digital finance promise. They also offer solid proposals for reform of EU financial services law.
25th anniversary of the EU Single market, celebrated in 2018, was the occasion for intensifying of the quantitative research on this phenomenon of the world economy. The paper is based on the EU ...official documents and the results obtained by the European competence centers. The method of calculating the effects of the EU Single market is critically considered. Against the background of a very high official assessment, the main internal and external challenges of the current stage of Single market development are outlined.
Highlights•Refugees and asylum seekers in Europe experience high mental health needs. •This population exhibits low contact coverage of specialist MHPSS services. •This population presents more ...frequently with physical health complaints. •Barriers to access include: language, stigma, low awareness, and variant help-seeking behaviours.
Postfunctionalism posits a tradeoff between the functional scale of governance and the territorial scope of community: functional scale is large and transnational for efficiency reasons; community is ...small-scale and (sub-)national for reasons of social trust and collective identification. COVID-19 has turned this tradeoff upside down: it has shrunk functional scale to the (sub-)national level in the name of security, while lifting expectations of community to the grand transnational scale in the name of solidarity. This reversal of scales has resulted in a rapid rebordering of the Single Market and the Schengen area on the one hand, and a significant debordering of fiscal risk and burden sharing on the other. We reconstruct the evolution of this double-movement from January to August 2020, contrast it to historical trends in the scale-community tradeoff of European integration, and discuss implications for postfunctionalist theory.
The costs and benefits of leaving the EU Dhingra, Swati; Huang, Hanwei; Ottaviano, Gianmarco ...
Economic policy,
10/2017, Volume:
32, Issue:
92
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper estimates the welfare effects of Brexit in the medium to long run, focusing on trade and fiscal transfers. We use a standard quantitative general equilibrium trade model with many ...countries and sectors and trade in intermediates. We simulate a range of counterfactuals reflecting alternative options for European Union (EU)–United Kingdom (UK) relations following Brexit. Welfare losses for the average UK household are 1.3% if the UK remains in the EU’s Single Market like Norway (a ‘soft Brexit’). Losses rise to 2.7% if the UK trades with the EU under World Trade Organization rules (a ‘hard Brexit’). A reduced-form approach that captures the dynamic effects of Brexit on productivity more than triples these losses and implies a decline in average income per capita of between 6.3% and 9.4%, partly via falls in foreign investment. The negative effects of Brexit are widely shared across the entire income distribution and are unlikely to be offset from new trade deals.
PDF
