Scale versus heterogeneity: how the economy affects public support for the EU

This paper proposes a simple political economic model of public opinion support for the EU, drawing on the recent economic literature on integration processes. The basic element is the existence of a trade-off between the benefits of centralisation and the costs of harmonising policies in the presence of heterogeneous preferences among countries. Subsequently we test the model with panel data on the EU member countries. The findings broadly confirm that economic benefits and costs do consistently shape citizens’ attitude towards EU membership. Our analysis may thus shed some light also on the awkward process of ratification of the European Constitution.Economic integration; European Union; Panel Data; Political Economy; Public Opinion

Knocking on the EU's door: the political economy of EU-Ukraine relations

The EU has recently launched the European Neighbourhood Policy, aimed at fostering integration with countries located close to its borders. This article proposes a liberal intergovernmentalist framework for the analysis of Ukraine's prospects of integration with the EU and apply it to evaluate the main economic and political benefits and costs associated to three possible scenarios: free trade area, fully developed European Neighbourhood Policy and EU accession. Two main conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, gains from integration would be asymmetrically distributed and would mostly accrue to Ukraine, whilst the main obstacles to integration would not be economic, but political. Secondly, the European Neighbourhood Policy does not represent a credible long-term alternative to EU membership for Ukraine; thus the outcome of the integration process should probably consist either in the mere creation of a free trade area or in EU accession.Economic integration; European Union; European Neighbourhood Policy; Ukraine

On the Expressiveness of Markovian Process Calculi with Durational and Durationless Actions

Several Markovian process calculi have been proposed in the literature, which differ from each other for various aspects. With regard to the action representation, we distinguish between integrated-time Markovian process calculi, in which every action has an exponentially distributed duration associated with it, and orthogonal-time Markovian process calculi, in which action execution is separated from time passing. Similar to deterministically timed process calculi, we show that these two options are not irreconcilable by exhibiting three mappings from an integrated-time Markovian process calculus to an orthogonal-time Markovian process calculus that preserve the behavioral equivalence of process terms under different interpretations of action execution: eagerness, laziness, and maximal progress. The mappings are limited to classes of process terms of the integrated-time Markovian process calculus with restrictions on parallel composition and do not involve the full capability of the orthogonal-time Markovian process calculus of expressing nondeterministic choices, thus elucidating the only two important differences between the two calculi: their synchronization disciplines and their ways of solving choices

Basic properties of nonsmooth Hormander's vector fields and Poincare's inequality

We consider a family of vector fields defined in some bounded domain of R^p, and we assume that they satisfy Hormander's rank condition of some step r, and that their coefficients have r-1 continuous derivatives. We extend to this nonsmooth context some results which are well-known for smooth Hormander's vector fields, namely: some basic properties of the distance induced by the vector fields, the doubling condition, Chow's connectivity theorem, and, under the stronger assumption that the coefficients belong to C^{r-1,1}, Poincare's inequality. By known results, these facts also imply a Sobolev embedding. All these tools allow to draw some consequences about second order differential operators modeled on these nonsmooth Hormander's vector fields.Comment: 60 pages, LaTeX; Section 6 added and Section 7 (6 in the previous version) changed. Some references adde

An Introduction to History Dependent Automata

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The Lisbon Strategy for social inclusion and the Common Agricultural Policy (Strategia di Lisbona per l'inclusione sociale e politica agricola comune: un esempio della difficile coerenza tra azioni di policy europee)

This paper represents a first attempt to evaluate the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the most relevant EU policy in financial terms, on social inclusion, one of the most important issues included in the Lisbon Strategy, launched by the EU in 2000. To do so, the paper focuses on how the various CAP measures have affected rural poverty in the EU and tries to identify the elements of congruence and conflict between the CAP and social inclusion goals. Market-oriented actions seem to exacerbate differences between rich and poor farmers, because they tend to favour those areas where agriculture is already more competitive. By contrast, rural development measures may be more helpful, even if they are still not adequately financed and pose some problems in terms of governance. The new 2007-2013 programming cycle brings some positive innovations, but synergies between the CAP and social inclusion could be more fully exploited.rural poverty; social inclusion; Common Agricultural Policy

Metric propositional neighborhood logic with an equivalence relation

The propositional interval logic of temporal neighborhood (PNL for short) features two modalities that make it possible to access intervals adjacent to the right (modality \u27e8 A\u27e9) and to the left (modality \u27e8 A\uaf \u27e9) of the current interval. PNL stands at a central position in the realm of interval temporal logics, as it is expressive enough to encode meaningful temporal conditions and decidable (undecidability rules over interval temporal logics, while PNL is NEXPTIME-complete). Moreover, it is expressively complete with respect to the two-variable fragment of first-order logic extended with a linear order FO 2[<]. Various extensions of PNL have been studied in the literature, including metric, hybrid, and first-order ones. Here, we study the effects of the addition of an equivalence relation 3c to Metric PNL (MPNL 3c). We first show that the finite satisfiability problem for PNL extended with 3c is still NEXPTIME-complete. Then, we prove that the same problem for MPNL 3c can be reduced to the decidable 0\u20130 reachability problem for vector addition systems and vice versa (EXPSPACE-hardness immediately follows)