ნაშრომი განიხილავს საქართველოს ეკონომიკური გარდაქმნების ისტორიას სსრკ-ს
დაცემის შემდგომ 1991 წელს დამოუკიდებლობის აღდგენის, დემოკრატიული
ახელმწიფოს დაფუძნების, გეგმიური ეკონომიკიდან ლიბერალური საბაზრო ეკონომიკისკენ გარდაქმნისა და ევროკავშირთან ახლო ინტეგრაციის მცდელობების განმავლობაში. ნაშრომი ასევე მიმოიხილავს ამ პერიოდში ეკონომიკურ განვითარებაზე მოქმედ სხვადასხვა პოლიტიკურ თუ სოციალურ ფაქტორებს.

It is widely agreed that a society must guarantee a social minimum to all its members. Yet, the organisation of social protection within the European Union (EU) is insufficient to protect all Europeans effectively against the risk of poverty and social exclusion. Against this backdrop, this thesis investigates whether a European universal basic income (EUBI) is, if at all, a worthwhile policy to address the problem of poverty in the EU.

The central claim of the study posits that there are strong reasons to consider a partial EUBI as a desirable instrument for EU-wide poverty alleviation. Under this scenario, the EU works as a complementary welfare layer offering systemic support to its Member States’ welfare models whilst respecting the diversity of national social protection arrangements. At the same time, as an instrument of pan-European solidarity, the EUBI provides substance to EU social citizenship.

The method used is problem-oriented and interdisciplinary, combining insights from political theory, political economy and EU studies writ large. After having layed out the various dimensions underpinning the problem of poverty in the EU and clarified the contours of the solution under scrutiny, the thesis confronts the EUBI with a series of challenges, ranging from normative issues associated with the unconditionality of the basic income and the pursuit of social justice in the EU, to the institutional hurdles pertaining to the legal feasibility of the proposal, via the macroeconomic difficulties related to the diversity of interdependent economies.

Overall, this contribution examines an idea which remains unexplored in EU studies and proposes a new approach to European anti-poverty strategy. It also bridges the gap between EU social policy and basic income literatures, beyond established boundaries of research compartmentalisation. As such, it prepares the ground for further fine-tuned research in the areas covered by this comprehensive multi-dimensional analysis.

The independent Annual Growth Survey (iAGS) brings together a group of economists to provide an independent alternative to the Annual Growth Survey (AGS) published by the European Commission. The iAGS is published simultaneously with the Annual Growth Survey of the European Commission at the start of the European semester. The title for 2017: "An elusive recovery unable to solve the social crisis".

The iAGS seeks to irrigate and inform the public debate on economic strategy in Europe. Sustainability of public debt, fiscal adjustment and exit strategies from the recession will be fundamental concerns in years to come. These issues are complex and cannot be addressed with off-the shelf or one-size-fits-all expertise. Instead, an open and in depth analysis of hypotheses, empirical evidence, options and foreseeable consequences of possible policies is required.

iAGS highlights topics, that often go overlooked, yet are essential, such as the role of monetary policy in the policy mix, the social consequences of the crisis, the importance of public investment. The project tackles public finances, unemployment, public debt, and formulates alternative and more efficient strategies that can move the economy towards balanced economic growth while maintaining price stability and full employment and preserving social progress.

In an environment shaken up by the 2007 financial crisis, the project leaders firmly believe in the need for an intellectually independent, conceptually pragmatic and fundamentally transparent analysis of the facts and policies that drive European economic and social progress now and in the future.

This article applies the governance typology used in this special issue to the evolution of euro area governance. The article begins with a description of Economic and Monetary Union’s original governance structure, with third order governance (shared norms) present in varying degrees in monetary, financial and fiscal governance. While a shared consensus on the importance of an independent central bank to pursue price stability allowed for the creation of the European Central Bank, euro area governance was otherwise limited to the coordination of national policies. Since the crisis, shifting norms (third order governance) allowed for the creation of new bodies (e.g. the European Stability Mechanism and the Single Supervisory Mechanism) and the expansion of the powers of existing institutions (particularly the ECB). In areas where no normative changes occurred (fiscal and economic policy coordination), second order governance has been marked by incremental changes to existing institutions. The degree to which economic governance has become more hierarchical depends both on the strength of third order governance norms and the preferences of large states like Germany either to retain their own sovereignty or create additional rules that bind member states.

This Article analyses the judicial and political accountability of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) in light of the seminal Mallis and Ledra cases. It seeks to determine to what extent the intergovernmental nature of the ESM has shielded its activity from the accountability mechanisms established within EU law. It then assesses whether the Proposal, recently issued by the Commission, to transform the ESM into an EU body, the European Monetary Fund (EMF), would improve the accountability of this body. It is argued that embedding conditionality policies in the European constitutional legal order constitutes a necessary, but not a sufficient step. To achieve this objective, it is necessary to couple a close judicial scrutiny by the Court of Justice with an equally substantial democratic oversight by the European Parliament.

On the basis of a brief reconstruction of the causes and impacts of the Euro crisis, this paper explores, counterfactually and hypothetically, whether the new Euro regime, insisting on fiscal austerity and supply-side reforms, could have prevented the rise of the crisis or is able to deal with its disastrous economic and social impact. A comparison with the likely impact of transfer-based Keynesian reflation suggests that, in both cases, economic success is uncertain, while both approaches are likely to produce severely negative sideeffects.  In light of such dismal policy choices, attempts to politicize European election campaigns are more likely to provoke unmanageable policy conflict than to overcome the input-oriented, democratic deficit of  European economic governance.

We propose implementation of a Golden Rule of Public Investment as a much needed institutional reform and an important step aimed at overcoming the constraints imposed by the new European Economic Governance. The Rule in question is widely accepted in traditional public finance and can deliver both intergenerational fairness and jobs. As such, it is important to modify at least the application of the European fiscal rules in order to allow net public investment to be financed by deficits, complemented by temporary expansionary fiscal policy in times of economic hardship with especially high unemployment. Although a fully-fledged implementation of the Rule would take some time, this should not be an excuse for not making use of pragmatic short-term Solutions which are readily available at the European level.

Underlying both scholarly and public debates leading up to the French rejection of the European Constitution was the common view that the European Union’s economic and social governance had become increasingly characterized by a stark asymmetry of economic and social integration especially in the post-Maastricht period and that this would undermine the European Social Model. This paper argues that while such an asymmetric approach to economic and social governance is retained in the Constitution, apprehensions over the future of the European Social Model – scholarly and otherwise – are largely unsupported due to two empirical observations. First, although the highly asymmetric Maastricht Treaty that set up Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was expected to undermine the European Social Model, the European welfare state panorama remained largely intact. Second, the Constitution introduced new openings in the area of social protection and thus provided a new platform for debating the future of a Social Europe alongside the tightly constitutionalized EMU-cum-economic governance.

This Briefing aims to present the main aspects of the EU economic governance legislative framework in light of the recent evaluation
issued by the European Commission. The regulatory mapping is accompanied by an overview on the main issues that have been
discussed so far in the debate on the Six-Pack and Two-Pack. It has been produced by the Policy Performance Appraisal Unit of the
European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS), as part of its analytical work on the implementation and operation of existing EU
legislation, programmes and policies in practice.

Una delle ragioni del recente successo in Italia (e ormai in Europa) dei movimenti populisti e sovranisti sembrerebbe risiedere nella progressiva erosione degli spazi decisionali riservati agli Stati nazionali e in particolare al circuito Governo-maggioranza parlamentare.
Com’è noto, tale erosione è dovuta ad alcuni fattori endogeni alle democrazie contemporanee e, sotto certi aspetti, legati al loro modus essendi, come la loro struttura istituzionale poliarchica, la presenza di un sistema di tutela dei diritti fondamentali, la stessa legalità costituzionale, e ad altri esogeni (e più recenti), legati al trasferimento di am- pie competenze in capo all’Unione europea (specie in materia di governance economica e monetaria) e, sotto altro profilo, al fenomeno della globalizzazione (in particolare dei mercati finanziari); detti fattori, restringendo il range delle opzioni politiche a disposizione delle forze partitiche nazionali (sino a ieri) dominanti, hanno determinato una profonda crisi non solo dei rappresentanti ma degli stessi rappresentati.
Va da sé che la crisi in parola abbia rappresentato il terreno di col- tura ideale per quel sentimento di cronica insoddisfazione, alla base dei movimenti politici populisti, rispetto alle forme di esercizio della sovranità popolare previste dalla costituzione, e in particolare a quelle attinenti alla partecipazione alla funzione di indirizzo politico.
A ciò, peraltro, va aggiunto l’enorme impatto che sullo sviluppo della posizione populista hanno avuto le virtualità comunicative ed espressive (pressoché infinite) della rete e dei media: alla insoddisfazione per il presente e per gli ordinari strumenti di partecipazione democratica, si sono così aggiunti, da un lato, il fenomeno della disintermediazione, inteso quale tendenza “dell’individuo a proporsi sulla ribalta sociale ed istituzionale senza la mediazione (sociale o politica) di soggetti terzi e anzi di rifiutarla” e, dall’altro, la destrutturazione completa della concezione del tempo.

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It is without a doubt that, whatever the opinion may be on the dominant
economic theories in Europe, the dynamics of the Single Market
and of Economic Governance have affected the “European Social
Model”, with implications on national social rights. This was all the
more evident at the heart of the EMU, where, as well as the single currency,
there is a reinforced system of sanctions and coordination of
economic and budgetary policies. Based on this scenario, the “dialogue
between Courts”, which has indeed done a lot for the multilevel protection
of rights, has had little or no success, having not – up to now –
managed to come up with suitable and efficient instruments of “containment”
of the priority economic and financial objectives and of the
social impact of the related stringent measures. The national Constitutional
Courts thus found themselves alone, in the difficult position of
having to “balance” economic figures and fundamental social rights. Finally,
however, something appears to be moving at the heart of the
EMU, where the «social fairness» of Economic Governance processes
and a «European pillar of social rights» are becoming the mainstreams
of a new phase of technical and political evolution. The target, pursued
by recent initiatives of the Commission, aims beyond the OMC, placing
the social dimension at the heart of Economic Governance, thus rebalancing
its “poor” position in relation to the prevalent “economics”
priorities.

With the different crisis processes unfolding in Europe, European integration has changed its modus. Critical observers have identified the rise of 'authoritarian neoliberalism' or 'new constitutionalism' in order to denote the new character and continued neo-liberal content of European integration. This article explores the content of the new European mode of integration by analysing several documents addressed to France by the European Commission as coordinating discourse; and the communicative discourse of German politicians who support and disperse this neo-liberal agenda, e.g. via interviews in French newspapers. In highlighting the discursive strategies of those speech acts, I argue that those discourses are undemocratic in character as they seek to depoliticise important issues. This analysis helps us understand how the EU disciplines larger member states and also why the French socialist government is not pursuing its election campaign programme but a mostly neo-liberal policy course in the area of economic, social and fiscal policies.

It is widely agreed that a society must guarantee a social minimum to all its members. Yet, the organisation of social protection within the European Union (EU) is insufficient to protect all Europeans effectively against the risk of poverty and social exclusion. Against this backdrop, this thesis investigates whether a European universal basic income (EUBI) is, if at all, a worthwhile policy to address the problem of poverty in the EU.The central claim of the study posits that there are strong reasons to consider a partial EUBI as a desirable instrument for EU-wide poverty alleviation. Under this scenario, the EU works as a complementary welfare layer offering systemic support to its Member States’ welfare models whilst respecting the diversity of national social protection arrangements. At the same time, as an instrument of pan-European solidarity, the EUBI provides substance to EU social citizenship.The method used is problem-oriented and interdisciplinary, combining insights fro...

Lacking democratic foundations, the EU authority has been founded on output legitimacy: to deliver (economic) prosperity mainly by means of rational governance. Yet currently, the austerity policies present the poster-example of irrational governance. While the contributors to this volume have shed light on the limits of EU to deliver rational output by means of law and legal rationality, I argue in this paper that – without democracy - the EU also can not deliver desired output by means of knowledge and technical rationality. I start the argument by sketching the relationship between democracy and knowledge in modernity. I claim that the embeddedness of expert institutions in democratic institutional setting plays an important epistemic role. Both constraining and steering knowledge production by expert bodies, democratic embeddedness contributes to the production of more reflective, socially inclusive knowledge. The EU’s failure to instantiate the channels for democratic input into its knowledge production is one of the root causes of its crumbling output legitimacy: the creation of many (internal) peripheries that can not participate in the projected futures. I turn afterwards to compare the three recent challenges to the EU knowledge governance - Brexit, TTIP, and Austerity – which may be seen as attempts to reclaim the democratic responsiveness of EU technocratic rule. The strategies of exit and voice used by various actors have however not been available across all three examined cases: in the Greek tragedy, the contestation of austerity has ended with subjugation. The subjugation ultimately appears as the mirror image of ‘rational’ governance unaccompanied by inclusive democratic process.

This article reassesses the theoretical expectations and empirical find- ings in the political economy literature on the impact of economic and monetary union (EMU) on European welfare states. After summarizing the literature which views EMU as the symbol of the primordial conversion to neoliberalism, the article identifies the underlying hypothesis, assumptions, and predictions of the earlier, largely apprehensive literature of the 1990s which was based on ex ante con- victions on EMU’s social consequences. Then it reviews more recent ex post studies pointing to dynamics of welfare state resilience informed by new empirical evidence that became available and new theoretical approaches that became influential. After highlighting the conditions under which welfare reforms have taken place and the role played by EMU in these processes, this article concludes by re-evaluating the earlier expectations in the literature in light of the empirical findings and draws lessons for the discipline of political economy.

Dopo una sintesi sulla teoria delle aree valutarie ottimali e delle vicende dell'Unione Monetaria Europea, si analizzano le fasi principali della nuova governance economica europea. Lo scopo di questo lavoro è quello di indicare gli insegnamenti utili, da trarre dalle alterne vicende dell'euro, sia per salvaguardare il suo ruolo futuro  di moneta internazionale sia per le regioni planetarie che hanno guardato all'euro come un modello di integrazione monetaria.

After a synthesis of the theory of the Optimum Currency Areas and of the alternate euro incidents, the main stages of the new European economic governance are analyzed. The aim of this study is to indicate the useful teachings, which can be drawn from the alternate euro phases, either in order to defend its future international currency role or for the use of the planetary regions which have looked at the euro as a model of monetary integration.

Il fine di questo lavoro è quello di analizzare le scelte di politica economica che hanno condotto alla crisi della finanza pubblica in Italia e di offrire un quadro di riferimento per valutare la manovra 2012-2014 e le politiche che la seguiranno. Il tema è stato diviso in due ventenni: 1972-1992 e 1993-2011, il primo contrassegnato da politiche di illusione finanziaria e fiscale, il secondo dall'eterodirezione parziale della politica economica, connessa al Trattato di Maastricht,  al Patto di Stabilità  Crescita e alla nuova governace economica europea , che però non ha evitato l'instabilità finanziaria che ha recentemente colpito il Paese.

The aim of this essay is to analyze the economic policy choices which have led to the crisis of the Italian public finance and to offer a background framework for evaluating the financial measures provided for the three years period 2012-2014 and the following ones. The issue has been dealt with reference to two twenty years periods: 1972-1992 and 1993-2011, the first marked by financial and fiscal illusion policies, the second by the partial heterodirection, connected to the Maastricht Treaty and the Growth and Stability Pact together with the new European economic  governance, which has been anyway unable to prevent the recent financial instability of the country.

Since the sovereign debt crisis, Economic governance for Euro area members has been transformed. This articles describes critically these evolutions.
La gouvernance s’est imposée comme une notion permettant d’analyser l’évolution de l’Union européenne et de son fonctionnement. Depuis la crise des dettes souveraines et la réforme de UEM, elle est employée pour qualifier la coordination des politiques économiques nationales. Un tel choix peut laisser sceptique et l’article recherche à démontrer en quoi il est discutable, voire contestable. La première partie analyse les mécanismes de la gouvernance économique qui la conduisent à s’imposer aux gouvernements nationaux. Dans un premier temps, les choix des politiques économiques nationaux sont évalués par l’Union européenne sur la base de critères prédéfinis. Les réformes de la gouvernance économique ont conduit à la généralisation d’une telle technique. Dans un second temps, les choix nationaux sont soumis à l’approbation ex ante – notamment les budgets – des institutions de l’Union, sous peine d’une sanction ex post. La seconde partie s’intéresse aux caractéristiques de cette nouvelle gouvernance économique. Elle peut, tout d’abord, être qualifiée de technocratique. Elle conduit, au niveau national comme européen, à l’intervention d’experts pour juger les choix politiques des parlements et gouvernements. La multiplication des rapports et procédures rend la lisibilité d’un tel processus délicate. Or, cette apparence technique ne saurait cacher l’existence d’un véritable gouvernement économique, quasiment mécanique, conduisant à appliquer, parfois à l’aveugle et sans réelle cohérence, un dogme prédéfini. Il s’agit là du reflet de l’impossibilité d’instituer un véritable gouvernement économique de l’Union, qui risque à terme de remettre en cause les structures sociales et politiques nationales.

This paper analyses the impact on regional and local authorities of Articles 117 and 119 of the Italian Constitution (hereafter referred to as "IC") as amended by Constitutional Law no. 1/2012. In particular, it attempts to verify whether the new formulation of these constitutional provisions materializes the risk of a significant reduction in the financial autonomy of both Regions and Local Governments. With the constitutional reform the legislative competence of "harmonization of public account" has become an exclusive State competence, the "balanced budget" principle has been extended to Regions and local authorities and public borrowing has been broadly prohibited. What is the actual significance of the changes introduced by Constitutional Law no. 1/2012 for the financial autonomy of Italian sub-national authorities? Is it time to recognise that the goals of financial independence of Italian fiscal federalism, launched by the reform of Title V of the IC, must give way to a new organization of public finance, where a central role is played by the central government in order to comply with the financial constraints arising from new challenges of the European economic integration process?

This paper starts from far (the European governance and, in particular, the European
Economic governance) and arrives nearer (representative democracy and National Parliaments).
While a constitutionalist scholar is not used to work with the first concept, the second one is the
core of the modern constitutionalism.
The paper does not deny the validity of the interdisciplinary concept of governance and
acknowledges that as soon as National Parliaments come across the governance processes their
traditional role is changing. Following this methodological approach, the paper notices that if the
European (and global) governance has already flawed National Parliaments’ traditional role the
European economic governance has caused a further restraint on their political scope through
benchmarks and statistical indicators. It is also far from this paper’s aims to challenge the validity of the economic theories underlying
the European economic governance procedures. But it is within a constitutionalist scholar’s
duties to defend the pivotal role of National Parliaments in economic, fiscal and budget policies,
not only because these subjects remain within the Member States’ competences (although under
the European coordination, surveillance and corrective mechanisms) but also because of their
political implications in term of social justice better represented by the inclusiveness and
pluralism of National Parliaments.
Paradoxically, although European law has contributed to the declining role of National
Parliaments, it has triggered their enhancement in the European institutional procedures, lastly
through the Two Pack’s provisions. Among these provisions we have selected the ones which
have opened a direct contact between the European Commission and National Parliaments
because of their «multiple virtues» towards further European integration, EU’s democratic
legitimacy and solidarity among Member States.
The first virtue is about the institutional dynamics which – at national level – enhance National
Parliaments’ control powers towards National Governments while – at European level –
(re)balance the Commission within the European institutional framework.
The second virtue is about the awareness processes which – at national level – strengthen
European knowledge and solidarity in National Parliaments (Art. 12, par. 1 and Art. 3, par. 3,
TEU), and – at European level – put in contact the European Commission with the pluralistic
and inclusive politics represented in National Parliaments fostering the politicisation started by
the Article 17, par. 7, TEU which links the appointment of the Commission’s President to the
elections of the European Parliament .
So European law has thrown the seeds of National Parliaments’ awareness participation, if they
wanted, to the European economic governance, in a euro-national institutional maturity
perspective.
The promise of these European law’s provisions is towards a more democratic legitimacy in the
European economic governance favouring more economic and budgetary integration and
solidarity among Member States. But the implied perspective of this promise seems to hide an
impotence and guilt acknowledgment by National Governments which for succeeding in their
purpose (against the spread Euroscepticism) they have had to call in accountability National
Parliaments. A timid recovery of representative democracy over European economic governance
procedures? Surely a clear evidence of the current validity of the concept inside changing
contexts (those of the European economic governance) which also appears as a necessary
instrument for developing more integration and solidarity among Member States within the
European economic processes.

This article applies the governance typology used in this special issue to the evolution of euro area governance. The article begins with a description of Economic and Monetary Union’s original governance structure, with third order governance (shared norms) present in varying degrees in monetary, financial and fiscal governance. While a shared consensus on the importance of an independent central bank to pursue price stability allowed for the creation of the European Central Bank, euro area governance was otherwise limited to the coordination of national policies. Since the crisis, shifting norms (third order governance) allowed for the creation of new bodies (e.g. the European Stability Mechanism and the Single Supervisory Mechanism) and the expansion of the powers of existing institutions (particularly the ECB). In areas where no normative changes occurred (fiscal and economic policy coordination), second order governance has been marked by incremental changes to existing institu...

This article applies the governance typology used in this special issue to the evolution of euro area governance. The article begins with a description of Economic and Monetary Union’s original governance structure, with third order governance (shared norms) present in varying degrees in monetary, financial and fiscal governance. While a shared consensus on the importance of an independent central bank to pursue price stability allowed for the creation of the European Central Bank, euro area governance was otherwise limited to the coordination of national policies. Since the crisis, shifting norms (third order governance) allowed for the creation of new bodies (e.g. the European Stability Mechanism and the Single Supervisory Mechanism) and the expansion of the powers of existing institutions (particularly the ECB). In areas where no normative changes occurred (fiscal and economic policy coordination), second order governance has been marked by incremental changes to existing institu...

Innovations are vital for economic development. Schumpeter, the famous economic theorist who drew attention to the innovation activities, was the first to reveal that capitalism has a structure that realizes development through innovations. Along with the 2000s, the European Union adopted a Schumpeterian approach and launched the Lisbon Strategy, however, this strategy has not been successful for various reasons. In this context, the Schumpeterian theory of "creative destruction" is well suited for evaluating innovation activities in the European Union. The main purpose of the study is to analyze the innovation activities in the European Union through research and development expenditures, business research and development expenditures, and the numbers of patent applications in the context of the theory of "creative destruction" put forward by Schumpeter. In this context, it was tried to reveal the Schumpeterian innovation capacity of the European Union between 2008 and 2018 in line with the data obtained from Eurostat. As a result of the study, it was concluded that innovation activities in the European Union could not fully realize the creative destruction effect and that there is a serious texture incompatibility in terms of economic structures within the EU member countries.

I will give an overview of the New European Economic Governance concerning “normal” Treatment of member states, its economic consequences and propose some alternatives . The main research interest concerns the question of the member states’ room for manoeuvre, especially in opting for an alternative economic policy. The main focus will be on Spain and Austria. The idea to be tested is that, although the NEEG (re)produces the restrictive economic policy orientation, the prevailing factor still is each concrete political decision at least on the European level.

Xavier Timbeau, Signe Dahl, Georg Feigl, Andrew Watt, Guillaume Allègre, Lars Andersen, Céline Antonin, Christophe Blot, Jérôme Creel, Bruno Ducoudré, Peter Hohlfeld, Paul Hubert, Sabine Lebayon, Sandrine Levasseur, Benjamin Lojak, Markus Marterbauer, Thea Nissen, Hélène Périvier, Miriam Rehm, Raul Sampognaro, Aurélien Saussay, Matthias Schnetzer, Thomas Theobald, Vincent Touzé, Achim Truger, Sébastien Villemot, Sepp Zuckerstätter

The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions is an autonomous body of the European Union, created to assist in the formulation of future policy on social and work-related matters. Further information can be found on the Foundation website at www.eurofound.europa.eu.

Co-authored with E. Léonard, R. Erne, S. Smismans and P. Marginson

The study aims to provide new information on the impact of new governance tools on the different actors of the European system of industrial relations – European institutions, governments and European social partners. Furthermore, it endeavours to: promote awareness and understanding of the new forms of governance and their impact on the different levels of industrial relations in the European Union; contribute to the ongoing debate on the Europeanisation of industrial relations in the context of the modernisation of employment relations and the evolving role of the social partners in an enlarged EU, especially against the background of the Lisbon agenda; contribute to the transparency of the results of new forms of governance in European industrial relations; and examine the interrelationship between the different levels of industrial relations as well as between different tools of new governance, such as European social dialogue and the open method of coordination.

This publication studies; firstly, the causes of the conflict north-south and the justification of economic interventions on periphery countries; secondly, why these interventions have reduced social support to the european economic governance and; finally, what strategies could be adopted in order to avoid the repetition of these cleaveges at EU institutional level.

This working paper analyzes the European Council decision on the status of the United Kingdom in the face of the British referendum on withdrawal. Important concessions on the economic and monetary union, competitiveness, the foundations of the EU, subsidiarity and social benefits for migrant workers in the EU are made. They are concessones in extremis to prevent withdrawal: some are red lines.
1) Introduction - (2) A promise launched in electoral campaign: calendar and method (3) What was seeking to negotiate the UK? and what he complains? - (3.1) Economic governance in the Eurozone and safeguards to non-participants -(3.2) Competitiveness - (3.3) The so-called issue of sovereignty (a "ever closer union") and more - (3.4) The free movement of EU citizens and "wellness tourism" -(4) The echo in the Member States and institutions - (5) The referendum - (6) Conclusions: The lack of alternatives to EU membership -

The article investigates the character of economic and financial crisis management dynamics in the European Union (EU) between 2007 and 2014. In particular, it explores the main actors and imaginaries structuring European governance processes in reaction to the North Atlantic financial crisis. First, a Cultural Political Economy perspective on power and discourse is developed by drawing on concepts from Neo-Gramscian International Political Economy and Critical Discourse Analysis. Second, concrete EU policy reactions to the crisis are distinguished into three main policy fields of crisis management, with each being examined in terms of the dominant economic forces, policy discourses and political actors that shape them. The article shows that pre-crisis modes of accumulation and regulation of the European economy have been broadly maintained and even sharpened by the crises in Europe. This consolidated reproduction is especially fostered by the evolutionary interplay of dominant transnational social forces from European export- and finance-oriented industries as well as of the established economic imaginary of competitiveness on the EU level. As such, the article argues for a rediscovery of transnational dynamics in European studies of the crisis as these dynamics play a crucial role in coordinating spatial, temporal and institutional varieties in European reactions to the crisis.

This paper analyses the impact on regional and local authorities of Articles 117 and 119 of the Italian Constitution (hereafter referred to as “IC”) as amended by Constitutional Law no. 1/2012.
In particular, it attempts to verify whether the new formulation of these constitutional provisions materializes the risk of a significant reduction in the financial autonomy of both Regions and Local Governments.
With the constitutional reform the legislative competence of “harmonization of public account” has become an exclusive State competence, the “balanced budget” principle has been extended to Regions and local authorities and public borrowing has been broadly prohibited.
What is the actual significance of the changes introduced by Constitutional Law no. 1/2012 for the financial autonomy of Italian sub-national authorities?
Is it time to recognise that the goals of financial independence of Italian fiscal federalism, launched by the reform of Title V of the IC, must give way to a new organization of public finance, where a central role is played by the central government in order to comply with the financial constraints arising from new challenges of the European economic integration process?