Observers generally assume that firms which engage in lobbying know what they want. Business—government relations and especially the corporate political activities of network operators during the basic telecommunication negotiations of the World Trade Organization present a slightly different...

This article reviews the literature on lobbying in the European Union. After initial surveys of the landscape of non-governmental actor participation, theoretical investigations have focused on the modes of network governance and later on the phenomenon of Europeanization. Yet studies have...

In this paper, we explore three scenarios for the future of the European Union, using history and reasoned imagination as guides. Our three scenarios are rooted in European contemporary challenges but draw on three ages that have shaped what Europe has become. Scenario 1 harks back to Antiquity...

This draft of our contribution to “The politics and economics of change in European social models” book project, is focused on the relation between macroeconomic policies and social models in the EU 15 during the last two decades. It first describes the shift towards the Maastricht...

Environmental policy is an art of execution. Hence the fact that European Union member states have recently managed to agree on targets of emissions to fight climate change leaves open the question of how they will meet them. Economics can not but embrace the scientific consensus on climate...

In this paper, we develop an analysis of the reasons for the apparent failure of the “Lisbon strategy” (2000) so far. After having made the general case for a comprehensive “institutionalist perspective” on the European economy, we first try to formalise the objectives of “Lisbon” in...

We present in this article a summary of our work on the relation between country size and growth strategy. We begin by reviewing the major steps in the literature on the economics of country size, focusing on contemporary contributions, from the Robinson volume (1960) to Alesina and Spolaore?s...