Johns Hopkins University SAIS Bologna Center

The European Union (EU) project of combining a single market with a common currency was incomplete from its inception. This article shows that the incompleteness of the governance architecture of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was both a cause of the euro crisis and a characteristic pattern of the policy responses to the crisis. We develop a “failing forward” argument to explain the dynamics of European integration using recent experience in the eurozone as an illustration: Intergovernmental bargaining leads to incompleteness because it forces states with diverse preferences to settle on lowest common denominator solutions. Incompleteness then unleashes forces that lead to crisis. Member states respond by again agreeing to lowest common denominator solutions, which address the crisis and lead to deeper integration. To date, this sequential cycle of piecemeal reform, followed by policy failure, followed by further reform, has managed to sustain both the European project and the common currency. However, this approach entails clear risks. Economically, the policy failures engendered by this incremental approach to the construction of EMU have been catastrophic for the citizens of many crisis-plagued member states. Politically, the perception that the EU is constantly in crisis and in need of reforms to salvage the union is undermining popular support for European integration.

CO(2) capture and storage (CCS) has the potential to develop into an important tool to address climate change. Given society's present reliance on fossil fuels, widespread adoption of CCS appears indispensable for meeting stringent climate targets. We argue that for conventional CCS to become a successful climate mitigation technology--which by necessity has to operate on a large scale--it may need to be complemented with air capture, removing CO(2) directly from the atmosphere. Air capture of CO(2) could act as insurance against CO(2) leaking from storage and furthermore may provide an option for dealing with emissions from mobile dispersed sources such as automobiles and airplanes.

We analyze cost developments for technologies required to produce renewable fuels by applying learning curves.

Abstract The idea of a “third sector” beyond the arenas of the state and the market is probably one of the most perplexing concepts in modern political and social discourse, encompassing as it does a tremendous diversity of institutions and behaviors that only relatively recently have been perceived in public or scholarly discourse as a distinct sector, and even then with grave misgivings. Initial work on this concept focused on what is still widely regarded as its institutional core, the vast array of private, nonprofit institutions (NPIs), and the volunteer as well as paid workers they mobilize and engage. These institutions share a crucial characteristic that makes it feasible to differentiate from for-profit enterprises: the fact that they are prohibited from distributing any surplus they generate to their investors, directors, or stakeholders and therefore presumptively serve some broader public interest. Many European scholars have considered this conceptualization too narrow; however, arguing that cooperatives, mutual societies, and, in recent years, “social enterprises” as well as social norms should also be included. However, this broader concept has remained under-conceptualized in reliable operational terms. This article corrects this short-coming and presents a consensus operational re-conceptualization of the third sector fashioned by a group of scholars working under the umbrella of the European Union’s Third Sector Impact Project. This re-conceptualization goes well beyond the widely recognized definition of NPIs included in the UN Handbook on Nonprofit Institutions in the System of National Accounts by embracing as well some, but not all, of these additional institutions and forms of direct individual activity, and does so in a way that meets demanding criteria of comparability, operationalizability, and potential for integration into official statistical systems.

By advancing integration through incomplete agreements, the European Union (EU) has created the very conditions for the emergence of crises, and this has, in turn, spurred on further agreements to deepen integration. Employing this theoretical lens, this article examines EU co-operation in asylum and migration that culminated in 2015 to determine whether crises are, in fact, integral to a cyclical process of EU integration rather than occasional events caused by external shocks. This is done by examining the failures and crises that emerged in migration and asylum policy up to 2015 and the agreements struck at EU level to address them. It is found that despite nominal action to address the weak monitoring mechanisms in use to date and incremental reinforcement of the constellation of institutions operating in this area, no solution has dealt with the critical lack of solidarity and absence of centralized institutions at the root of these issues.

Abstract This paper challenges widespread philosophical and conceptual theories of the nonprofit sector and the state that question, or leave little conceptual room for, extensive cooperation between nonprofit organizations and government. To do so, the paper calls attention to shortcomings in the prevailing market failure/government failure theories of the nonprofit sector that have obscured recognition of key features of the sector that make cooperation with the state a natural and necessary path to effectiveness, and to certain inherent limitations of the state that make engagement of nonprofits a natural and useful path to state effectiveness. The article then outlines a set of conditions that must be met by both nonprofits and governments for this partnership to achieve the promise of which it is capable.

Abstract Focusing on the EU's relations with its periphery, this paper takes issue both with persistent ‘normative’ conceptions of the EU's international role in the European Studies literature and with the constructivist–rationalist divide in IR theory. The conceptualization of the EU – a vast, composite and ever‐expanding entity with ‘fuzzy’ borders – as an empire of sorts bridges the theoretical divide and offers a powerful explanation of the EU's behaviour vis‐à‐vis its vicinity. Through the transfer of rules and practices beyond its borders, the EU is indeed engaged in ‘normative’ policies, which however primarily serve the security and economic interests of the EU and its Member States. Thus, the EU's (allegedly) norm‐based behaviour is in itself a utility‐maximizing strategy, which also serves the construction of a normative identity. The EU's response to the Arab uprisings serves to illustrate the argument, with the concept of ‘empire’ resolving the puzzle of seemingly inconsistent EU policies.

Journal Article The reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–51 Get access The reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–51. By Alan S. Milward. London: Methuen. 1984. 527pp. Index. £25.00. ISBN 0 416 36530 2. Geoffrey Warner Geoffrey Warner 1The Johns Hopkins University, Bologna Center Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 62, Issue 1, Winter 1985, Pages 129–130, https://doi.org/10.2307/2618110 Published: 01 January 1985

In response to a rapid decline in world oil prices, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman introduced a new economic blueprint called Saudi Vision 2030 and the accompanying National Transformation Plan that would enable the Kingdom to diversify its heavily oil-dependent revenue base, reduce its growing budget deficits, balance its budgets, and promote long-term economic growth. This article analyses the goals of the Vision and the policies offered to achieve them, which entail significant reforms to the Kingdom’s fiscal and budgetary procedures and policies. This study considers the political and institutional challenges that confront the Saudi Vision and its likelihood of success.

The theory of employment that grew out of the Great Depression was not long in influencing government policy-makers and revolutionizing older concepts of fiscal policy. The most important of Keynes's practical lessons, that policies which promote investment and exports and inhibit saving and imports increase employment and output, has now hardened into a dogma and filtered down into almost all the elementary textbooks. The lesson, by and large, was a good one, but the dogma presents the danger that the lesson might be uncritically applied in situations where other government policies render it invalid. This paper is concerned with the most important exception to the rule. The mercantilist element in Keynesian policies is definitely inapplicable to countries whose central banks do not peg the price of foreign exchange or gold. Tariffs, trade controls, and export subsidies are likely to worsen employment and output in all those situations in which, with a fixed exchange rate, they would improve employment and output. Moreover, if exchange rates are flexible, an increase in investment or government spending, and a reduction in saving or taxation, will have a substantially different effect on employment than that predicted by the traditional foreign trade multiplier. The reason lies in the fact that equilibrium in the balance of payments is automatically maintained by variations in the price of foreign exchange.

African countries are in a unique position to reap the socio-economic and environmental benefits of renewable resources as a means for meeting increasing energy demand in a sustainable way. A critical obstacle for the deployment of renewable energy technologies in Africa is the difficulty of attracting sufficient and affordable finance. This paper compares the impact of financial conditions on the cost of electricity generation across six renewable and three fossil-based technologies in 46 African countries. The results show large cost variations and highlight the extent to which renewables are disadvantaged by current financial practices. The energy-economy-environment model TIAM-ECN is used to show how lowering financing costs results in a much higher deployment of renewables. For example, solar PV could account for 10–15% of total electricity generation by 2050, even without explicit climate policy, thanks to financial de-risking programmes. The results demonstrate that changes in financing schemes could outweigh the impact of technology learning. This paper also demonstrates that, once ambitious climate policies are in place, reducing financing costs for renewables could be an efficient way to lower greenhouse gas emissions. Financial de-risking is thus a key ingredient for unlocking the renewable energy potential in Africa.

Existing theories of European integration offer little purchase on the problems facing the European Union today. New theories of disintegration are emerging, but they remain disjointed. The purpose of this comment is to suggest an overarching theoretical framework. This framework helps to structure the existing literature and to suggest new areas for research. It also helps to explain how integration and disintegration interact at different levels of aggregation.

The European Union’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic revealed changes and continuity in the structure and the functioning of the European project. In lieu of a conclusion to the Special Issue, this article discusses what those lessons tell us about how Europe responds to the following crisis. We compare European responses to the pandemic to those that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We observe more differences than similarities. The same actors do not always play the central role, solidarity among Europeans is sometimes more challenging to engineer, and the requirements to make the overall project more resilient can point in different directions. Such findings show that any argument that Europe is forged through crisis is unlikely to tell us much about what Europe is or where it may be headed. In that sense, the EU is a sui generis multi-level, multi-faceted actor that can change shape in response to events.

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Everyone knows about seasonality. But what exactly do we know? This study systematically measures seasonal price gaps at 193 markets for 13 food commodities in seven African countries. It shows that the commonly used dummy variable or moving average deviation methods to estimate the seasonal gap can yield substantial upward bias. This can be partially circumvented using trigonometric and sawtooth models, which are more parsimonious. Among staple crops, seasonality is highest for maize (33 percent on average) and lowest for rice (16½ percent). This is two and a half to three times larger than in the international reference markets. Seasonality varies substantially across market places but maize is the only crop in which there are important systematic country effects. Malawi, where maize is the main staple, emerges as exhibiting the most acute seasonal differences. Reaching the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger requires renewed policy attention to seasonality in food prices and consumption.

Abstract The global economic crisis has sapped support for the euro and lowered trust in the European Central Bank (ECB). In doing so, it has also exposed a weakness in the ‘output‐oriented legitimation’ of Europe's economic and monetary union. The common monetary policy and single currency have to be perceived as working if they are to maintain popular acceptance. Whether they actually work is less important than this perception. This raises the prospect that no matter how successful the ECB is in responding to moments of crisis, public opinion may begin to reflect the perception that it has failed. Indeed, the greater the uncertainty experienced during the crisis, the more likely it is that such negative perceptions will predominate. Worse, there is very little that the ECB can do to change popular perceptions or to create new channels for input‐oriented legitimation without jeopardizing the credibility of its commitment to price stability or its reputation for political independence.

The use of geothermal energy in Europe is expected to grow rapidly over the next decades, since this energy resource is generally abundant, ubiquitous, versatile, low-carbon, and non-intermittent. We have expanded and adapted the integrated assessment model TIAM-ECN to more adequately reflect geothermal energy potentials and to better represent the various sectors in which geothermal energy could possibly be used. With the updated version of TIAM-ECN, we quantify how large the share of geothermal energy in Europe could grow until 2050, and analyze how this expansion could be stimulated by climate policy and technological progress. We investigate geothermal energy’s two main applications: power and heat production. For the former, we project an increase to around 100–210 TWh/yr in 2050, depending on assumptions regarding climate ambition and cost reductions for enhanced geothermal resource systems. For the latter, with applications in residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural sectors, we anticipate under the same assumptions a rise to about 880–1050 TWh/yr in 2050. We estimate that by the middle of the century geothermal energy plants could contribute approximately 4–7% to European electricity generation. We foresee a European geothermal energy investment market (supply plus demand side) possibly worth about 160–210 billion US$/yr by mid-century.

The practice of national courts in Europe with regard to enforcement immunity is far from uniform. Nevertheless, certain common principles have emerged over the last decades. Absolute immunity from enforcement measures has been largely abandoned and almost all jurisdictions have adopted a restrictive approach to enforcement immunity in one or another form. Enforcement measures are usually permitted in case of waiver or with regard to earmarked property. In practice, the most important exception from immunity concerns non-governmental property. Here it is primarily the purpose of the property against which enforcement measures are sought that determines whether or not immunity will be granted. This article surveys the judicial practice in Europe, focusing on the case-law of the last 50 years, in order to permit an assessment of whether various recent codifications, most importantly the 2004 United Nations Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities of States and Their Property, actually codify such practice or depart from it.

SUMMARY Most of the important generalizations of international trade theory that owe their origin to the classical school are long‐run and static in nature, implicitly assuming that disequilibrium is a transitory state and that passage between equilibria is untroubled. Yet past experience seems to indicate that external disequilibria can remain for extended periods of time, and that the modern system is a disequilibrium system . The nature of the international disequilibrium system has sometimes been attributed, erroneously, to the Keynesian foreign‐trade‐multiplier theorem that an increase in exports will induce an increase in imports which is smaller than the initial increase in exports, and this has been the origin of the belief that “HUME'S law” is invalid in the case of saving and unemployment. However, HUME'S law is valid even in this case if gold flows are allowed to have their natural effect on the internal money supply and hence on interest rates, investment and incomes. HUME'S law is therefore valid in the case of Keynesian unemployment, although the price‐specie‐flow mechanism is replaced by an income‐specie‐flow process. The true nature of the international disequilibrium system derives from the fact that central banks do not allow externally‐induced gold flows to affect the internal supply of money since that would conflict with the new primary goal of monetary policy; full employmentwithout inflation. The new function of monetary policy leaves a policy vacuum with respect to the balance of payments, except insofar as ad hoc policies are designed to suit special circumstances. Gold flows are therefore automatically neutralized by open market operations in some countries, while in other countries monetary policy in effect cancels or reinforces the monetary effect of gold flows in the pursuit of internal stability. At critical times, when foreign exchange reserves become dangerously low and subject to speculation, or when they become burdensomely high, action by the authorities must be introduced even if this is at the expense of internal stability. Even in these cases, however, the system need not become an equilibrium system since the objective might be to recoup reserves or allow them to run down.

Endowed with half of the world's known oil and gas reserves, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is cornerstone of the global energy architecture. The global low-carbon energy transition poses critical questions to MENA oil and gas producers, as it may imply sustained pressure on their development models, which rely heavily on hydrocarbon revenues. Without economic reforms, this may translate into macroeconomic unbalances, and ultimately put at risk established social contracts in the region. The sharp drop in oil prices that began in 2014 fostered MENA hydrocarbon producers to launch ambitious economic reform programmes aimed at increasing the diversification of their economies, notably by developing their non-hydrocarbon sectors. This article argues that – together with the pressing need to create jobs opportunities for a large and youthful population – the possibility of the world moving more aggressively towards a low-carbon future should represent a key argument for the implementation of these economic reform programmes. That is, MENA producers might use the potential prospect of lower global hydrocarbon demand and prices to overcome their rentier state model, and pursue the economic diversification plans never duly implemented in the past.