The Politics of Galileo. European Policy Papers #7

[Summary]. The EU institutions, supported by a number of private sector and public actors, are promoting a EU capability in satellite navigation, referred to in Europe as the EU Galileo project. It represents one of the major public-private enterprises ever undertaken in Western Europe, in particular at the EU level. Europe had no collective presence in satellite navigation in the early 1990s. The perceived threat of import competition and of being outpaced by overseas competitors (US industry), and the associated political and economic costs of not supporting a European contribution to satellite navigation, led to infant-industry intervention. The European Commission identified an institutional void and acted upon it, stressing the importance of the project to EU member states. In particular, the EU transport ministers and the European defense and military establishments were involved in promoting the project. The EU member states granted the Commission a central management role. One of the politically controversial issues was the EU public financing of the project, which if too high would reduce the benefits that the EU member states expected to gain from political intervention. It turned into a burden-sharing issue where economic and political actors did battle over distributional issues, e.g. whether the EU Galileo project would be a public or a purely commercial enterprise. In late 2000 and early 2001, the controversies escalated when the EU member states were to commit substantial public funds to the project. In 2001, however, the EU Transport Council endorsed a road map for an industrial policy that supports satellite navigation and the EU Galileo project. This policy paper offers some background for this development, examines some of the central political issues involved, and suggests some areas that will play an important role in shaping the success of this ambitious project

"Government-business strategies and transatlantic economic relations: Between hegemony and high technology"

This [paper] contends that collective support for high technology development largely depends on variation in relative economic and industrial competitiveness and that it better explains behavior and strategies for satellite navigation and wireless Internet in the European Union and the United States. The relative international positions of EU and U.S. (and Japanese) economies and high-technology capabilities are different today compared to the 1980s and 1990s and have been strengthened in several areas, followed by EU and U.S. industrial support that in many instances has become more global in orientation. The U.S. approach to wireless Internet, influenced by a relatively weaker competitive position in industrial terms, has been aimed at creating a level-playing field and objecting to EU industrial policy. It eventually supported a free market orientation, but only after aggressive lobbying on the part of a number of industrial coalitions against the interests that promoted American CDMA technology (code division multiple access). Its approach to satellite navigation has been aimed at both supporting national security priorities and, through explicit industrial policy considerations, CPS as the dominant global standard

Global Competition and Strategies in the Information and Communications Technology Industry: A Liberal-Strategic Approach

This article examines the roles of multinational corporations and the European Union (EU) in structuring global competition around wireless standardization. It analyzes the realities of global competition in information and communications technology (ICT) markets from a more liberal-strategic viewpoint than the subsidy-based industry support promulgated by strategic trade theorists in the 1980s and 1990s. According to a liberal-strategic trade perspective, public actors try to tweak the rules of the world economy to structure global competition in ways that enhance job creation, overall competitiveness in high-technology sectors, and domestic welfare, rather than being primarily concerned about import competition. The story of the European approach to global standardization and competition--and the strategic use of international standards bodies by multinational corporations--primarily represents an aggressive outward-oriented strategy. European actors pursued a globally oriented strategy in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) with the objective of aligning Europe with market and policy developments in the rapidly growing markets of the Asia-Pacific region. By downplaying the importance of import competition, often stressed by strategic trade theorists a liberal-strategic approach to the ICT industry focuses on the prospect of cutting-edge innovations based on a coherent industry strategy that looks at the creation of internationally competitive technologies in the longer-term rather than at incremental change and current import competition pressure.

Introducing Temporal Analyzability Late in the Lifecycle of Complex Real-Time Systems

Many industrial real-time systems haveevolved over a long period of time and were initially so simple that it was possible to predict consequences of adding new functionalityby common sense. However, as the system evolves the possibility to predict the consequences of changes become more and more difficult unless models and analysis method can be used