Markets Institutions as Communicating Vessels Deregulation and Changes between Economic Coordination Principles

economic policy; competition policy; institutions; regulation

Attempts to Dodge Drowning in Data. Rule- and Risk-Based Anti Money Laundering Policies Compared

Both in the US and in Europe anti money laundering policy switched from a rule- to a risk-based reporting system in order to avoid over-reporting by the private sector. However, reporting increased in most countries, while the quality of information decreased. Governments drowned in data because private agents feared sanctions for not reporting. This ``crying wolf'' problem. (Takats 2007) did not happen in the Netherlands, where the number of reports diminished but information quality improved. Reasons for this can be found in differences in legal institutions and legal culture, notably the contrast between US adversarial legalism and Dutch cooperative informalism. The established legal systems also provide for resistance to change. Thus lowering sanctions in order to reduce over-reporting may not be a realistic option in a legal system which traditionally uses deterrence by fierce criminal and private legal sanctions. Furthermore, a risk-based approach may not be sustainable in the long run, as litigation may eventually replace a risk-based approach again by a rule-based one, now with precise rules set by the courts.money laundering, anti money laundering policy, risk based regulation, rules, standards, comparison of legal systems, tort law

A Comparison of the Construction Industry in Europe, Characteristics, Governance, Performance and Future Perspectives

Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Serie

"Between Structure and Incident. A Sociological-Institutionalist Approach to the Riddle of Transposition Delays of European Food Safety Directives"

[From the Introduction]. The Dutch cannot expand their highway system as they like, because that gets them in conflict with European air quality standards; strictly enforcing the latter could also deal a death blow to the huge Dutch chicken industry; Germany has to change its returnable can system, as it de facto discriminates against foreign beer producers; France can no longer resist liberalizing its energy markets; and the Greek government can no longer demand that baby food can only be sold in pharmacies. Increasingly national policymakers 'hit' against the the constraints 'imposed' on them by the EU. The costs can be high. An, in European eyes, illegal detail of the Dutch corporate tax cost the tax office an annual one billion euros in income; the European habitat directive prevents the Dutch from drilling for natural gas. European directives, that are largely responsible for such constraints, have - in order to become such constraints - to be transposed in national law in the Member-States, on their way from laws-in-the-books to laws-in-social-action. Transposition is a necessary prerequisite for the subsequent stages of administration, enforcement, and sanctioning. That is, transposition is an important form of 'Europeanization', of the influence of 'Europe' on its Member-States

Bureaucracy around the state : varieties of collective self-regulation in the Dutch dairy industry

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020

Markets Institutions as Communicating Vessels Deregulation and Changes between Economic Coordination Principles

http://www.iue.it/RSCAS/WP-Texts/02_06.pd

Being a citizen in Europe : insights and lessons from the Open Conference, Zagreb 2015

With the Open Conference "Being a Citizen in Europe" in Zagreb (Croatia, 29-30 June 2015) external scholars were invited to connect to the bEUcitizen-project and to explore theoretical foundations and political as well as practical realities of today’s European citizenship. The structuring idea was to highlight potential core barriers towards EU citizenship and to do so by way of conceptual discussions as well as empirical analyses mapping a variety of citizenship practices in the EU. This was reflected in four thematic streams gathering contributions from both external and bEUcitizen researchers. The streams reflected on different kinds of barriers, conceptual and practical ones. They revolve around the normative promise of citizenship, the diversity of practices and possible paths of future development. While stream 1 reflected on the dynamic of (re)configuring citizenship as a bounded or unbounded concept, stream 2 applied a comparative perspective on the diversity of rights-based citizenship practices. Stream 3 addressed the political dimension of EU-Citizenship and discussed a lack of citizenship participation as a farreaching barrier as well as possible remedies. Finally, stream 4 focused on linguistic diversity and the difficulties it creates regarding the conceptual and practical dimension of EU-citizenship. Taken together the contributions lucidly reflect the variety of disciplines cooperating in the bEUcitizen-project and their different points of view on EU-citizenship. The crucial lesson from the contributions to the Open Conference for the theoretical task of WP 2 and the bEUcitizen-project more generally is that without conceptual clarity about the meaning of EU-citizenship the task of identifying practical barriers and evaluating the latter’s effects remains ambivalent. A shared understanding of the meaning of a (future) EU citizenship is still missing. What shall EU citizenship be or become: a fully-fledged democratic citizenship or a market-citizenship, bundling certain rights implied by the internal market freedoms? This undecided question is at the core of the debate on EU citizenship. In order to prevent citizens from turning their backs on the EU a public contestation of our understanding of the EU is needed. European democracy à venir requires an ongoing public debate about what European integration is all about and where it should lead us to – even and especially when there is no consensus about it

Interest Associations and Economic Growth. A Critique of Mancur Olson's `Rise and Decline of Nations'

The paper contradicts the thesis of Mancur Olson presented in `The Rise and Decline of Nations', using empirical evidence from studies on business interest associations and sectoral corporatism. We argue first that, unlike Olson assumes, selfish interest associations are not necessarily detrimental to economic performance and growth. Second, again in contradiction to Olson, it is not true that the more associations exist, the greater their political influence will be and hence the more they will tend to pervert public policy. By contrast, the greater the number of associations, the less their overall political influence is likely to be. Third, the number of associations does not increase over time. Instead, mergers tend to reduce the number again. War does not break up `distributional coalitions' as Olson assumes, but has rather tended to strengthen them. Hence, the overall argument that stability produces more selfish interest associations and increases institutional sclerosis, and thus diminishing economic performance and growth, does not hold.By contrast, interest associations can contribute positively to economic performance, even through measures traditionally considered detrimental to the optimal allocation of input factors, such as market entry-barriers and price cartels. We demonstrate this for the Dutch construction industry, which has such forms of self-regulation, but nevertheless scores high on indicators of static and dynamic efficiency compared to other European countries. At a more general level, long-term growth rates (1929 94) demonstrate that countries where such forms of sectoral corporatism are prevalent do at least not have lower growth rates than countries which frown upon sectoral self-regulation. The data indicates that there is a trade-off between flexibility and stability. Associations provide such stability in the market. Whether the positive effects of stability or the negative effects of rigidity dominate, depends on sectoral characteristics and problems, such as the strength of competition and the degree of shelter from international competition.Business Associations; Corporatism and Economic Performance; Logic of Collective Action; War and `Distributional Coalitions'

How to Dodge Drowning in Data? Rule- and Risk-Based Anti Money Laundering Policies Compared

In the past decade, anti-money laundering policy has switched both in the US and in Europe from a rule- to a risk-based reporting system in order to avoid over-reporting by the private sector. However, reporting instead increased in most countries, while the quality of information decreased. Governments were drowned in data because private agents feared sanctions for not reporting. However, unlike in other countries, this crying wolf problem (Takats, 2007) did not happen in the Netherlands, where the number of reports diminished, but information quality improved. The reasons for this can be found in differences in legal institutions and legal culture, notably the contrast between US adversarial legalism and Dutch cooperative informalism. The established legal systems also provide for resistance to change. Thus, lowering sanctions in order to reduce over-reporting may not be a realistic option in a legal system which traditionally uses deterrence by fierce criminal and private legal sanctions. Furthermore, a risk-based approach may not be sustainable in the long run, as litigation may eventually replace a risk-based approach again by a rule-based one, now with precise rules set by the courts.