As fears of a recession make fiscal policy ever more relevant, we need to discuss reforming economic governance rules. Many of the Commission’s good intentions fail to achieve what they set out, leaving us with a fiscal architecture that is pro-cyclical and unreliable, hindering the green and digital transitions and economic growth. After three years […]
European Commission
The economic governance reform is very much a political issue. The EU Commission has brought forward a package for reforming the EU fiscal rules. Behind its technicalities, which may be difficult to navigate for the uninitiated, lie choices that are political by nature: what societal objectives to prioritise? Who takes the decisions? The proposals made […]
When Vladimir Putin first invaded Ukraine in 2014, Europeans had a simple choice: increase or decrease their energy dependence on Russian fossil fuels. Europeans chose to increase. National governments like Spain and France could have freed themselves from Russian gas just by implementing their own national building renovation plans. But they chose not to.
Last March, Spain and Portugal reached a historic agreement: for the first time ever, two European countries could set a price cap on gas for power generation, for a period of twelve months. A period to seek agreements was opened in both countries, which ended on 9 June, when the European Commission gave the final approval to the mechanism. This undoubtedly proves that the current European Union is very different to the European Union we were living in during the financial crisis of the last decade.
From the local to supranational scale, the Covid-19 crisis forced the world to face the question: who should oversee the solutions? Which authority, and on what ground? This question, and the change of paradigm it brought, is an opportunity to debate and reflect on the place of citizens in the decision-making process, especially in places far from power centres, such as rural areas. Examples of citizens’ participation in rural areas, from successful and less successful strategies to the place of the public sector at the local and European levels in community-led development, can show the way.
On 27 April, the Commission proposed a package of five different measures to facilitate legal migration to the EU from non-EU countries. Although the individual measures are useful, they will do little on their own to create more immigration opportunities because access to the EU labour market is controlled by member states.
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