Reinforcing Europe’s failed fiscal regulatory state

Fiscal governance in the EU is an exemplary case of the regulatory state; the EU governs member states’ fiscal and public policies through rules rather than expenditure. The weaknesses of the EU fiscal regulatory state were apparent to observers from before the introduction of the Euro, and were exposed in the financial crisis. EU leaders have nonetheless redoubled their commitment, expanding the range of policies subject to the fiscal regulatory stage, its intrusiveness into member state policies, and the penalties for noncompliance. We review and analyze them and conclude that there is a high risk that the EU fiscal governance will further increase the intrusiveness and unpopularity of the EU without disciplining member states or markets.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134505/1/Scott Greer and Holly Jarman_Revised_2.pdfDescription of Scott Greer and Holly Jarman_Revised_2.pdf : Main articl

Imagined commodities: "Trade and" policies in the European Union and United States.

The international trade agenda has expanded in recent years to incorporate a wide range of non-trade issues, under pressure from the world's two largest traders, the United States and the European Union. Incorporating policies on issues such as labour standards, the environment and health into trade agreements effectively turns them into 'imagined commodities'. The EU and US are exporting their values with the aim of harmonizing standards in other countries with their own. Like commodities, these standards would not vary in quality between producers. They have value to negotiators as bargaining tools, as policy models, and as instruments for compliance. Although the actual impact of these policies on developing countries is debatable, policymakers and interest groups imagine them to be very important, sometimes important enough to derail trade negotiations. Mixing elite interviews with textual analysis of press releases and key government documents, I examine the use of non-trade policies by US and EU trade negotiators to achieve their secondary goals - whether this is legitimating the policy process, distracting critics, or projecting the image of a benign foreign power. Examining interactions between interest groups and policy officials I find that while US officials use these new issues to benefit domestic constituencies, EU policymakers use them to enhance the EU's international standing in foreign policy. Behind this story are fundamental differences in the way that trade policymakers interact with key diffuse and specific interest groups. The consequences of this expanding trade agenda are a need for better coordination between government departments and agencies, increasing pressure on negotiators to address unfamiliar issues, and uncomfortable questions about the nature of policymaking in a globalized world

The new political economy of healthcare in the European Union: The impact of fiscal governance

We argue that the political economy of health care in the European Union is being changed by the creation of a substantial new apparatus of European fiscal governance. A series of treaties and legal changes since 2008 have given the EU new powers and duties to enforce budgetary austerity in the member states, and this apparatus of fiscal governance has already extended to include detailed and sometimes coercive policy recommendations to member states about the governance of their health care systems. We map the structures of this new fiscal governance and the way it purports to affect health care decisionmaking.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120416/1/New political economy as accepted.pdfDescription of New political economy as accepted.pdf : Main articl

Modeling and Simulation as Boundary Objects to Facilitate Interdisciplinary Research

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/150614/1/sres2564.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/150614/2/sres2564_am.pd

Restorative Justice in the East Midlands. A Brief Overview of Current Practice in Leicester, Leicestershire, and Rutland

Issue 1 of the EMRJ Briefing Series focuses on a brief overview of restorative justice across Leicester, Leicestershire, and Rutland, including a description of practices delivered by some of the local services, and a concise analysis of the issues and challenges that professionals are facing in their day-to-day practice

Going it alone: health and Brexit in the UK

When the UK left the single market, it marked the end of the application of European law and institutions which underpinned many elements of health and health care in the UK. Regulations on medicines and devices, laws on the buying and selling of care, trade agreements, and rules on migration which had previously worked across most of a continent, were repatriated to the UK. This report, an interim output from the Health and International Relations Monitor project funded by the Health Foundation, considers the impact of leaving the EU and changing international relations for health. It considers changes in health across six key areas: medicines and devices, international trade agreements, devolution, procurement, workforce and Northern Ireland. In the full report to be published in the Spring, we intend to examine two of the building blocks of health most affected by Brexit - workforce and living standards

Dissemination of evidence-based body image interventions: A pilot study into the effectiveness of using undergraduate students as interventionists in secondary schools.

Dissonance-based body image interventions are among the most effective interventions for adolescent girls. However, dissemination of these interventions remains challenging. In addition, the emerging field of positive body image suggests that interventions should promote body appreciation as well as reduce pathology. The current study examines whether undergraduate students can effectively deliver a dissonance-based intervention to secondary school girls. In addition, it examines whether this intervention can increase body appreciation. Sixty-two adolescent girls were randomly allocated to the intervention or control condition. In the intervention group, body dissatisfaction was significantly reduced and body appreciation was significantly improved from pre- to post-intervention. There were no changes in body dissatisfaction or body appreciation in the control group. There was a reduction in thin-ideal internalization for all participants. These preliminary findings suggest that undergraduate students can be effective interventionists for dissonance-based programs in schools and dissonance-based interventions can promote body appreciation

Full Information Product Pricing: An Information Strategy for Harnessing Consumer Choice to Create a More Sustainable World

Research and practice in the information systems (IS) field have been evolving over time, nourishing and promoting the development of applications that transform the relationships of individuals, corporations, and governments. Building on this evolution, we push forward a vision of the potential influence of the IS field into one of the most important problems of our times, an increasingly unsustainable world, which is traditionally considered the product of imperfect markets or market externalities. We describe our work in Full Information Product Pricing (FIPP) and our vision of a FIPP global socio-technical system, I-Choose, as a way to connect consumer choice and values with environmental, social, and economic effects of production and distribution practices. FIPP and I-Choose represent a vision about how information systems research can contribute to interdisciplinary research in supply chains, governance, and market economies to provide consumers with information packages that help them better understand how, where, and by whom the products they buy are produced. We believe that such a system will have important implications for international trade and agreements, for public policy, and for making a more sustainable world

Building a Certification and Inspection Data Infrastructure to Promote Transparent Markets

This article reports on data architecture that reduces information asymmetries to support public-private collaboration to govern product certification and inspection for promoting transparent markets and building consumer trust. The data architecture is a proof-of-concept set of data standards called the Certification and Inspection Data Infrastructure Building Block (CIDIBB) for data storage, retrieval, sharing and automated reasoning of data that can be used to respond the question: what constitutes a trustworthy certification and inspection process? CIDIBB consists of three interrelated ontologies, focusing specifically on certified fair-trade coffee that has the potential to become universally applicable to any certification and inspection process for products or services. The evaluation results suggest that CIDIBB is able to test the trustworthiness of certification schemes, providing consistent results. CIDIBB will contribute to support public-private collaboration to solve public problems such as the promotion of sustainable production and fair labor practices