trade

December 1, 2017

Credit Day: Debt and Deficit in a Bipolar EU

6 December marks Credit Day across the European Union. This is the day when, on average, European countries’ central administrations will exhaust their annual tax revenue and start living on credit to meet their spending commitments, according to a study by the Institut Economique Molinari.
November 1, 2017

Artificial Intelligence and the EU Labour Market

Widespread automation is often named as the greatest long-term threat to human employment. But Europe’s immediate job market problems are of a different sort: regulatory, structural and demographic.
November 1, 2017

Accepting the Scientific Consensus: GMOs in the EU

The ECJ ruled that Italy had been wrong to ban the cultivation of an EU-approved genetically modified maize. This was a big victory for the plaintiff, an Italian farmer who was denied the right to grow the MON 810 maize.
November 1, 2017

Health by Stealth: Mandatory Food Reformulation

Food and soft drinks manufacturers are continually reformulating their products and bringing new products to market in response to consumer demand. In recent years, there has been growing interest in mandatory reformulation to reduce the salt, sugar and/or fat content of food.
November 1, 2017

Fair and Efficient? On the EC’s Proposals for Corporate Tax Reform in the Digital Single Market

n the wake of the Ecofin meeting that took place in Tallinn on September 15-16, the European Commission published a communication on “A Fair and Efficient Tax System in the European Union for the Digital Single Market” — code for “How to extract more tax revenue from multinational digital companies”.
October 1, 2017

The Consequences of Restricting the Posted Workers Directive

Posted workers are temporarily sent from one member state to another, usually for projects of short duration. There were 1.1. million posted workers in the EU in 2015, equivalent to 0.4 per cent of all full-time employment.