EU Budget Expenditure

The fourth book in the 'European Public Investment Outlook' series focuses on the urgent issue of how to finance needed investment in critical tangible and intangible infrastructure given high levels of public debt, a thorny problem facing many governments across Europe. Drawing on expertise from academics, researchers at public policy institutes and international governance bodies, the contributors analyse the current situation and prospects and propose feasible solutions. Financing Investment in Times of High Public Debt offers a powerful combination of high-level analysis of cross-continental policies and trends, with close examination of specific contexts in France, Italy, Germany and Spain. The chapters in Part II explore challenges including how to finance climate investments, the extent to which national promotional banks can offer solutions, EU budget reform and recent trends in tax progressivity. This book is essential reading for economists, policymakers, and anyone interested in implementing and financing public policy in Europe and wanting to better understand the intricacies of EU governance and institutions.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues to have a devastating economic and social impact. Active combat is concentrated in eastern and southern Ukraine, while continued attacks on critical energy infrastructure had a severe social toll over the winter. Civilian casualties continue to rise, and over a third of the population has been displaced. The war has had a profound impact on the economy: activity contracted by 30 percent in 2022, a large swathe of the country's capital stock has been destroyed, and poverty is on the rise. The authorities have nevertheless managed to maintain overall macroeconomic and financial stability, thanks to skillful policymaking and substantial external support.

This two-volume textbook teaches about the uniqueness and the difficulty of the European unification project. It describes, as clearly as possible, what Robert Schuman declared in 1950, that "... Europe will not be made all at once...". Navigating the nexus of four academic fields - political science, institutional analysis, economics, and history - the book serves as a reference work for accurate, exhaustive, and well-researched information on the creation and functioning of the European Union.  Volume 2 provides a comprehensive overview of the European Union's institutions and policies, such as agricultural and fisheries policies, economic and monetary policy, environmental policy, foreign affairs and defence policy, social policy, competition policy, regional policy, as well as immigration and asylum policy. Supported by numerous photographs, diagrams, maps, and sources, the book will serve as an essential textbook for undergraduate and graduate students studying the subject of European integration, as well as a useful resource for a broader audience interested in the European integration process.

Financial risk management for institutional investors has recently grown in scope to include long-term sustainability considerations and climate change risk concerns. This book shows how a national central bank in the Eurosystem has adapted its financial risk management principles and practices against the background of non-conventional monetary policy measures and following the introduction of sustainability criteria, with a special role for carbon-neutrality. The topics covered include a market-based approach to evaluating credit risk, the development of an independent credit rating system, and the properties and limitations of agencies' sovereign ratings. Furthermore, the book analyzes the integration of sustainability principles into strategic asset allocation and describes the use of machine learning techniques for discerning the role of the E, S and G variables in equity returns. The authors also discuss the growth of the global green bond market and the greenium, as well as the sustainability indicators for large portfolios of corporate and government securities. Given its scope, the book will appeal to all professionals working in the field who would like to know the state-of-the-art in these areas.

How do governments in Europe justify their budgets towards the national parliament? Are their socioeconomic policies shaped more by electoral pressures or by their commitments towards the European Union? In Between Voters and Eurocrats, Johannes Karremans presents a framework and methodology for studying these questions. Based on theories of democratic legitimacy, he argues that if governments temporarily pursue unpopular policies with the justification that they need to be fiscally responsible, in subsequent years they need to become more responsive again to domestic socioeconomic demands in order to maintain the trust of citizens. The recent crises faced by European countries have repeatedly evoked the impression that European economic governance constrains governments' ability to be responsive to domestic demands. Today, especially in the European Union, maintaining financial sustainability of the state has become tied to international obligations. Karremans raises the concern that financial considerations are more important than people's demands and investigates whether this proposition is true through comparative study focussing on five countries - Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain - and explores how governments maintain a balance between institutional responsibility and democratic responsiveness.

Intro -- Vorwort und Themenabriss -- Inhalt -- Konrad Scorl: Die Europäische Union in der Reifeprüfung -- Gerald G. Sander und Tilman Schürer: Konflikt statt Kooperation - Bundesverfassungsgericht und Europäischer Gerichtshof im Streit -- Oliver Sievering: „Next Generation EU" ein nachhaltiger Aufbauplan? -- Thieß Petersen: Europas Rolle in der internationalen Arbeitsteilungnach der Corona-Pandemie -- Gunter Deuber: EU und EZB: Wirtschaftspolitische Herausforderungen und Antworten im Kontext der COVID-19-Krise und desr ussischen Kriegs in der Ukraine -- Gunter Deuber, Fjorent Rrushi, Oleksandr Pecherytsyn and Ivona Zametica: EU enlargement: Western Balkans and embracing Ukraine - "Accession illusion" vs. new geopolitical reality.

The Repoliticization of the Welfare State grapples with the evolving nature of political conflict over social spending after the Great Recession. While the severity of the economic crisis encouraged strong social spending responses to protect millions of individuals, governments have faced growing pressure to reduce budgets and make deep cuts to the welfare state. Whereas conservative parties have embraced fiscal discipline and welfare state cuts, left-wing parties have turned away from austerity in favor of higher social spending. These political differences represent a return of traditional left-right beliefs over social spending and economic governance.  This book is one of the first to systematically compare welfare state politics before and after the Great Recession, arguing that a new and lasting post-crisis dynamic has emerged where political parties once again matter for social spending. At the heart of this repoliticization are intense ideological debates over market regulation, social inequality, redistribution, and the role of the state. The book analyzes social spending dynamics for 28 countries before and after the crisis. It also includes in-depth country case studies representing five distinct welfare state types: Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, and the Czech Republic.

In this open access book, the editors explicitly address the issue of measuring gender equality. The book introduces readers to basic concepts of gender equality, equity and equal opportunities, then discusses measuring these phenomena, the methods of constructing indicators, and reviews the main indicators that have been proposed at the international level to measure gender equality. It then sets the theoretical discussions against the findings from a Jean Monnet project financed by the European Union to highlight the importance of a regional analysis of gender equality in four main study areas: Italy, Spain, France and Germany. The results make it clear that it is necessary to move from the purely national perspective hitherto used in gender equality analyses to a regional one because differences can be highly pronounced even within the same country. This is a self-contained volume requiring limited statistical expertise for the reader and is aimed at social researchers and policymakers who wish to address gender equality from a quantitative perspective.

Der Austritt des Vereinigten Konigreichs aus der EU markiert ein epochales Ereignis nicht nur fur das Land selbst, sondern auch fur Europa als Ganzes. Insofern kann der Brexit nicht einfach auf eine rein britische Problematik beschrankt werden, vielmehr betrifft er den Kern des europaischen Projekts als solches, da er augenscheinlich das Ende einer immer engeren Union der Volker bedeutet. Ausserdem werden institutionelle, ideelle und soziookonomische Bruchstellen innerhalb der EU und zwischen einzelnen Mitgliedsstaaten sichtbar, deren Behandlung die bisherige Balance im europaischen Mehrebenensystem neu kalibrieren wird. Die zu Ehren von Prof. Dr. Roland Sturm zusammengestellte Festschrift arbeitet erstmals politische, strategische und finanzielle Brexit-Konsequenzen fur das Vereinigte Konigreich, fur die Europaische Union sowie fur ausgewahlte EU-Mitgliedsstaaten heraus. Mit Beitragen von Elisabeth Alber, Klaus Brummer, Mario Cavaliere, Frank Decker, Annegret Eppler, Robert Fischer, Eckhard Jesse, Tim Griebel, Udo Kempf, Mario Kolling, Michael Kreile, Ralf Lissek, Ruth Maloszek, Kerstin Maurer, Klaus-Jurgen Nagel, Richard Stinshoff, Erik Vollmann, Thorsten Winkelmann und Klaus Ziemer.