Economics & Trade

The EU is currently mobilising its market power through a range of new policy tools. Examples include the Climate Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM), the International Procurement Instrument and the Anti-Coercion Instrument. The general aim, as explained in the EU’s trade policy review and the recent industrial strategy, is to make the EU stronger, more assertive and more geopolitically relevant.

In our recent JCMS article, we try to understand the EU’s pivot away from multilateralism and market-making towards OSA. Our starting point is the changing nature of Europe’s global context, and how this created an opening to challenge Europe’s embedded neoliberal compromise.

How can we explain the very uneven economic outcomes in EU member countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially considering that the shock was largely symmetric?

The Treaty of Rome in 1957 did not mention industrial policy as a designated Community competence but its preambles declared a high degree of competitiveness an overarching goal, which indirectly laid the basis for a supranational intervention. Industrial policy has been a key pillar in the gradual reconfiguration of several national markets into one giant single market at the outset but it vanished in name during the decades of neoliberal restructuring.

As COVID-19 gripped the globe in March 2020, politicians suddenly started discussing the EU’s trade policies in a way that would have been deemed lunacy just a few months earlier.

Almost a decade after the last major reform of the European fiscal framework, Eurozone decision-makers have recently engaged in a discussion about the revision of fiscal rules. The pandemic is said to have changed the landscape of European economic policymaking. It has forced policymakers to embrace expansionary fiscal policies to address the diminished economic activity […]

The 2007-9 financial crisis and the subsequent Eurozone debt crisis posed an existential threat to the single currency and even the European project as a whole. Financial imbalances that had built up in the decade were at the heart of both crises.

Brexit is based on blatant mistruths and lies. Every reason given to leave was a stinking falsification. When, one day, there is a public inquiry into how our country was conned, there will be gasps into how conniving, cunning politicians managed to get away with it. Lies, lies and more lies. That’s how Leave won. […]

For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Dr Billy Melo Araujo, from the Queen’s University, in Belfast.

European Union (EU) leaders introduced the bloc’s most comprehensive plans yet to combat climate change.