Rules enforcement in the EU: “Conditionality” to the rescue? Bertelsmann Stiftung Policy Paper 28.05.2019

• Since the 1990s, the EU has used its budget not just to implement policies, but also to influence member state behaviour. Payments to governments and regions can be increased as an incentive or suspended as a punishment. In EU circles, this is called “budget conditionality”. It is a little known but common instrument. Today, budget conditionality covers such diverse areas as fiscal policy rules, economic reforms, human rights standards and environmental protection. • Recent years have highlighted the EU's weak position vis-à-vis member states that refuse to implement EU rules and decisions, for example on fiscal policy, refugees and democratic standards. Budget conditionality is now being discussed as one way to remedy this problem. • In preparation of the next long-term budget (MFF) starting in 2021, the European Commission has published proposals to strengthen existing conditionality mechanisms and to introduce a new procedure aimed at suspending EU payments to those countries that do not respect the rule of law. • We review the proposed instruments and evaluate whether they are likely to help the EU achieve its goals. We argue that, in principle, the EU budget can be useful as a carrot or stick to influence member state behaviour but it cannot fully make up for a lack of political will

Users, Data, Networks A Proposal for Taxing the Digital Economy in the European Single Market. Bertelsmann Stiftung Policy Paper 12 March 2019

Fair taxation of digital businesses will be a key issue in the forthcoming European election campaign. The debate will most likely revolve around the introduction of a new “digital tax” on companies’ turnover, as proposed by the European Commission, for example. In the short term this may be a workable solution, but it does not solve the real underlying problem: the current rules on corporate taxation in the EU are not fit for purpose when it comes to dealing with digital value creation. That is what we want to change with our proposal. To this end, we define clear criteria and principles for assessing digital value creation in company taxation, which should apply EU-wide. Our contribution thus fills a central gap even of those current proposals that do not envisage a new tax, but aim at a change in the system itself

Approximately bisimilar symbolic models for nonlinear control systems

Control systems are usually modeled by differential equations describing how physical phenomena can be influenced by certain control parameters or inputs. Although these models are very powerful when dealing with physical phenomena, they are less suitable to describe software and hardware interfacing the physical world. For this reason there is a growing interest in describing control systems through symbolic models that are abstract descriptions of the continuous dynamics, where each "symbol" corresponds to an "aggregate" of states in the continuous model. Since these symbolic models are of the same nature of the models used in computer science to describe software and hardware, they provide a unified language to study problems of control in which software and hardware interact with the physical world. Furthermore the use of symbolic models enables one to leverage techniques from supervisory control and algorithms from game theory for controller synthesis purposes. In this paper we show that every incrementally globally asymptotically stable nonlinear control system is approximately equivalent (bisimilar) to a symbolic model. The approximation error is a design parameter in the construction of the symbolic model and can be rendered as small as desired. Furthermore if the state space of the control system is bounded the obtained symbolic model is finite. For digital control systems, and under the stronger assumption of incremental input-to-state stability, symbolic models can be constructed through a suitable quantization of the inputs.Comment: Corrected typo

THE MFF PROPOSAL: WHAT’S NEW, WHAT’S OLD, WHAT’S NEXT? Bertelsmann Stiftung Policy Brief 21 May 2018

On 2 May 2018, the European Commission released its proposal for the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), covering the years 2021-27. In its own words, the Commission tabled ‘a new, modern long-term budget, tightly geared to the political priorities of the Union at 27’. This article analyses how much change and how much continuity the current proposal truly contains and discusses the next steps and possible negotiation dynamics

Approximately bisimilar symbolic models for incrementally stable switched systems

Switched systems constitute an important modeling paradigm faithfully describing many engineering systems in which software interacts with the physical world. Despite considerable progress on stability and stabilization of switched systems, the constant evolution of technology demands that we make similar progress with respect to different, and perhaps more complex, objectives. This paper describes one particular approach to address these different objectives based on the construction of approximately equivalent (bisimilar) symbolic models for switched systems. The main contribution of this paper consists in showing that under standard assumptions ensuring incremental stability of a switched system (i.e. existence of a common Lyapunov function, or multiple Lyapunov functions with dwell time), it is possible to construct a finite symbolic model that is approximately bisimilar to the original switched system with a precision that can be chosen a priori. To support the computational merits of the proposed approach, we use symbolic models to synthesize controllers for two examples of switched systems, including the boost DC-DC converter.Comment: 17 page

Six Word Stories through Spain and Morocco

Pola Isabelle Bonete, Astrid Gaytan, and Jessica Cannon discuss student engagement at Linfield College with regard to intercultural competence and cultural sensitivity gained through their January Term 2019 course in Spain and Morocco.https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/inauguration2019_students/1001/thumbnail.jp