Delegation to the European Commission in EU migration policy : expertise, credibility, and efficiency

In 1999, with the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty, European Union (EU) migration went from being an area of intergovernmental cooperation to one governed by ever closer version of the Community Method. This shift resulted in a significant production of secondary legislation being agreed at the EU level, regarding all areas upon which the EU had some degrees of competence, namely asylum and refugee, irregular migration, legal migration, administrative cooperation, and border and visa policy. The academic literature is divided in how to interpret policy developments in this area. Some academic contributions have emphasised the divergence from traditional EU policy methods, others have analysed migration policy in the perspective of traditional questions about EU integration, and the majority had some normative assessments of the policies being formulated. This thesis tackles EU migration policy from the point of view of delegation. It proposes to assess the extent of EU integration in this area by measuring the amount of powers the Council of the European Union has granted to the European Commission. The dissertation finds that delegation has occurred in this policy area, and to an extent that is comparable to other, older policy areas, but is uneven across migration categories. Past delegation studies highlighted a number of possible determinants of delegation, such as reducing uncertainty, strengthening the credibility of commitments, achieving efficiency, as well as institutional contexts. This dissertation finds evidence for the credibility and efficiency rationales, as well as conflict between the Council and the Commission. This study is relevant to current debates about how much power EU institutions are and should be granted, whether these institutions are biased towards the nature of the policies, and current trends in EU integration

MIGRATION POLICY INDEXES

In the framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, high attention is put on migration and in particular on “planned and well-managed migration policies” (SDG 10.7). To compare policies across time and space, robust well-conceived indexes to be able to measure and aggregate relevant indicators of these policies are needed [or something like this]. As one of the activities of the migration policies research line carried out by the EC Knowledge Centre on Migration and Demography (KCMD), this technical report maps and analyses migration policy indexes, explaining their methodologies and accounting for their main findings. [I would define what policy indexes are, what they are supposed to measure, and then state what the report is aiming at] Recently, there have been several undertakings at systematically coding and comparing policies over time and across countries. A map of these initiatives will provide some clarity, allowing for a comparison and guidance for their use. Some of the research questions that will be addressed are ‘What databases are available for the analysis of migration policies in a given country?’, ‘What kind of policies are analysed?’, ‘How policies have been treated methodologically [not very clear]? The report is structured following two main policy areas, namely immigration (admission) and immigrant (integration) policies. A further distinction is on sector-specific indexes dealing exclusively with individual policy areas, e.g. asylum, or labour migration, and more recent comprehensive efforts to fully account for a wide spectrum of asylum and migration policies that are typically adopted by States [not clear]. This report is useful for the analysis and assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of the methodologies and explanatory power of these indexes, but can also be of help to policy makers in analyzing individual countries’ migration management systems, to compare and evaluate the various policy initiatives that have been enacted in the past and which are still likely to have relevance for current migratory challenges. Added value of the study can be summarized as follows: • To provide clarity on several undertakings already developed • To allow for comparison and guidance for the use of the various indexes • To detect gaps and best practices in the methodologies • To produce a meta-database of policy indexes as a reference for quantitative analyses of policies • To interpret trends and changes in migration policies over time • To support analyses and historical comparisons of country’s overall migration management, or of specific policiesJRC.E.6-Demography, Migration and Governanc

Quitting the EU wouldn’t give Britain more control over refugee and migrant flows

Those campaigning for a Brexit frequently argue that Britain would have more control over its borders if it left the EU, protecting it from the large numbers of people hoping to settle in Europe. Marco Scipioni and Paula Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik explain the opt-outs Britain has already secured from EU migration and border policies and conclude that there would be no clear benefit from leaving the EU

Design, Construction and Testing of a 3-Component Force Balance for Educational Wind Tunnels in Undergraduate Aerodynamics

This article is focused on providing detailed instructions on how to build and use a force balance for educational wind tunnels. The article’s objective is to encourage undergraduate students in underfunded programs to engage in the field of aerodynamics. The discussed force balance represents an affordable device that only requires basic components like Arduino board, a servo motor, and acrylic and aluminum as construction materials. A simple data collection example is included at the end of the article showing that this simple force balance can collect meaningful data about lift, drag, and moment coefficient of a tested airfoil

Delegation to the European Commission in EU migration policy : expertise, credibility, and efficiency

In 1999, with the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty, European Union (EU) migration went from being an area of intergovernmental cooperation to one governed by ever closer version of the Community Method. This shift resulted in a significant production of secondary legislation being agreed at the EU level, regarding all areas upon which the EU had some degrees of competence, namely asylum and refugee, irregular migration, legal migration, administrative cooperation, and border and visa policy. The academic literature is divided in how to interpret policy developments in this area. Some academic contributions have emphasised the divergence from traditional EU policy methods, others have analysed migration policy in the perspective of traditional questions about EU integration, and the majority had some normative assessments of the policies being formulated. This thesis tackles EU migration policy from the point of view of delegation. It proposes to assess the extent of EU integration in this area by measuring the amount of powers the Council of the European Union has granted to the European Commission. The dissertation finds that delegation has occurred in this policy area, and to an extent that is comparable to other, older policy areas, but is uneven across migration categories. Past delegation studies highlighted a number of possible determinants of delegation, such as reducing uncertainty, strengthening the credibility of commitments, achieving efficiency, as well as institutional contexts. This dissertation finds evidence for the credibility and efficiency rationales, as well as conflict between the Council and the Commission. This study is relevant to current debates about how much power EU institutions are and should be granted, whether these institutions are biased towards the nature of the policies, and current trends in EU integration

The gender gap in support for governments during the COVID crisis

Using data covering most European Union Member States, we study how the support for national governments has unravelled in the first months of the COVID pandemic. Motivated by the growing evidence on the uneveneconomic impact of this crisis across genders, we study if suchunequal economic burden is related to differences in support for public authorities between men and women. While the support for national governments has overall faded in the period considered, the decline has been more pronounced for women and working women in particular. We find indication that the decline in support signals a shift in concerns among Europeans and women in particular, from the health emergency to the economic consequences of the pandemic. We impute up to a third of the widening gender gap in support for government to the shift of emphasis from the health to the economic dimension of the crisis

Images in clinical medicine: gouty arthritis with osteomyelitis

Gout is one of the most common inflammatory arthropathies, characterized by the deposition of monosodium urate crystals in the synovial membrane, articular cartilage and periarticular tissues and leading to inflammation. The natural history of articular gout is typically composed of four periods: asymptomatic hyperuricemia, episodes of acute attacks of gout (acute gouty arthritis) with asymptomatic intervals (intercritical gout), and chronic tophaceous gout. Tophi develop in 12-35% of gouty patients without adequate control of uricemia. Initially, they do not cause significant complaints or function limitation of the nearby joints. However, if they become larger, joint instability and movement range limitation, joint function impairment and bone erosions and infection at the sites of their penetration can develop.We report a case of a poorly controlled polyarticular tophaceous gout complicated by osteomyelitis

Adherence to antibiotic treatment guidelines and outcomes in the hospitalized elderly with different types of pneumonia

Background: Few studies evaluated the clinical outcomes of Community Acquired Pneumonia (CAP), Hospital-Acquired Pneumonia (HAP) and Health Care-Associated Pneumonia (HCAP) in relation to the adherence of antibiotic treatment to the guidelines of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the American Thoracic Society (ATS) in hospitalized elderly people (65 years or older). Methods: Data were obtained from REPOSI, a prospective registry held in 87 Italian internal medicine and geriatric wards. Patients with a diagnosis of pneumonia (ICD-9 480-487) or prescribed with an antibiotic for pneumonia as indication were selected. The empirical antibiotic regimen was defined to be adherent to guidelines if concordant with the treatment regimens recommended by IDSA/ATS for CAP, HAP, and HCAP. Outcomes were assessed by logistic regression models. Results: A diagnosis of pneumonia was made in 317 patients. Only 38.8% of them received an empirical antibiotic regimen that was adherent to guidelines. However, no significant association was found between adherence to guidelines and outcomes. Having HAP, older age, and higher CIRS severity index were the main factors associated with in-hospital mortality. Conclusions: The adherence to antibiotic treatment guidelines was poor, particularly for HAP and HCAP, suggesting the need for more adherence to the optimal management of antibiotics in the elderly with pneumonia

Phase structured wavefields with phase singularities and bispectral properties

The work presented in this dissertation can be subdivided into two parts. The first part illustrates the novel use of a 37 actuator segmented deformable mirror for the creation of optical vortex beams ranging in topological charge from 1 to 10. The segmented deformable mirror offers a dynamic, polarization independent alternative for creating vortex beams with arbitrary charge. An optical vortex mode purity comparison between the deformable mirror and multi-step diffractive phase plates with 16 and 32 discrete steps is carried out both analytically and in simulation. Computer simulations show the intensity and phase of the vortices generated with the two methods. The deformable mirror, by being reconfigurable, shows better mode purity for high charge OVs, while the static phase plate mode efficiency declines due to the fixed number phase quantization. The second part of the dissertation reviews the concept of the bispectrum (3rd order polyspectrum) and the possibility of creating partially spatially coherent beams with nonzero bispectral characteristics. Numerical simulations show that bispectral properties encoded in an input wavefield are invariant upon propagation in free space. This result opens the possibility of using the bispectrum as a new degree of freedom for encoding information in a wavefield