2021 has been a year of passage for Brexit – the process of the United Kingdom (UK) withdrawal from the European Union (EU) – but the Promised Land, much hailed by the Brexiteers, seems increasingly a faraway mirage. On the one hand, 2021 marked yet another step in the process of UK detachment from the […]
Budget
The EU’s fiscal rules are currently deactivated due to the Covid-19 crisis. However, returning to the pre-Corona rules would be counterproductive. The first priority of reform efforts should be to ensure that applying the rules will not deepen economic crises and hold back recovery. The second priority should be to allow for more public investment. […]
The work on revising the fiscal rules of the European Union had started long before Covid-19. The global pandemic had put the work on hold, for good reasons. Now that the EU debt levels have risen to new highs the past year, there is a strong need to speed up the process to ensure the […]
Last week, the G7 announced to support a 15 per cent minimum global corporate tax rate in order to eliminate profit shifting into the low tax countries. The agreed tax rate represents a big compromise as it is far from the rates suggested by the US (21 per cent) and the OECD (19 per cent). […]
The European Skills Agenda is a call for action on a set of ambitious targets, and involves the upskilling and reskilling of millions of adult people by 2025. To implement the Skills Agenda, governments and social partners, state and non-state actors will have to innovate their cooperation arrangements, and learn new roles and responsibilities. The […]
Two weeks ago, the European Commission published a highly ambitious Communication on a European Health Union. There is little doubt that the EU’s role in health will increase significantly in the near future. There should not just be more Europe, but also a better Europe at play in this crucial policy domain. We need a […]