European Union Experience Research Articles

Taxes in an e-commerce generation

Rapid growth in e-commerce has altered the ability of jurisdictions to enforce commodity taxes on a destination basis. This results in different effective tax rates depending on the way in which goods and services are purchased and the characteristics of both the products and the sellers. We discuss the arguments for the destination principle as the appropriate place-of-taxation rule for consumption taxation of cross-border trade. We analyze various recent reforms to the value-added tax in the European Union in response to e-commerce. We then examine various policy options in the USA—maintaining the status quo, changing nexus rules, states adopting information reporting, and national reforms that require firms to remit taxes regardless of physical presence—and relate them to the recent European reforms. We conclude based on our analysis and the recent European Union experience that reforms at the national level appear to be the important next step to enforcing commodity taxes at destination in the USA.

Assessment of the Reliability-Cost Efficiency of the Pumping Subsystems at Water Treatment Plant

Abstract In last years all countries of the European Union experience decrease of water consumption. What is worse, in most cases large European water treatment plants (WTP) have been design and built decades ago, when water consumption was much higher than nowadays. It is a challenging task to adjust WTP’s capacity to the current water demand as it is associated with costs and safety issues. Minding that fact, authors decided to propose an new authorial methodology of combined reliability-cost efficiency assessment for water supply system with exceeded redundant capacity, based on new index - unit indicator of reliability-cost efficiency. It included both reliability and costs aspects. It was decided to present the new method on example of the pumping subsystems working for WTP in Poland. The research was based on Activity-Based Life Cycle Costs (AB-LCC) methodology together with two-parametric reliability evaluation. Using real operational and financial data an application of proposed authorial reliability-cost indicator was presented. The reliability-cost efficiency assessment allowed to present how operation of each pumping subsystem influenced global operational costs of WTP. This information is essential for decision-making process for rational management of technical facilities.

Investment Mediation and Regional Economic Integration Organizations: The European Union and the Central American Integration System in Comparative Perspective

International investment agreements (IIAs) often provide for arbitration as the main dispute settlement method, but they rarely regulate mediation. However, this legal landscape is changing rapidly due to the inclusion of clauses contemplating mediation and the adoption of specific rules by international bodies. Investment mediation is presented as a complementary tool that avoids the escalation of conflicts and is more effective and less time consuming and causes less disruption to the investment environment. Against this backdrop, the main aim of this article is to explore recent developments in investment mediation in regional economic integration organizations (REIOs), focusing on the European Union's experience.

The Impossible Transplant of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme: The Challenge of Energy Market Regulation

AbstractFollowing the European Union (EU) experience, an increasing number of countries are establishing an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The EU ETS often serves as a ‘model’ despite fundamental differences in the receiving environment. In the EU liberalized energy markets, carbon prices are intended to raise the cost of carbon-intensive energy and thereby stimulate cleaner alternatives. In contrast, many emerging economies continue to regulate energy investments and prices, which may insulate consumers and producers from the impact of an ETS. To avoid this risk, energy economists advocate EU-style energy market reforms as a prerequisite to the introduction of the ETS concept abroad. By focusing on the cases of China, Kazakhstan, and Russia, this article highlights the limits on the exportation of the EU liberalization model and argues that, instead of energy reform, the ETS must be reconceptualized as a mechanism that integrates the regulated energy market paradigm in emerging economies.

Taxes in an E-Commerce Generation

Rapid growth in e-commerce has altered the ability of jurisdictions to enforce commodity taxes on a destination basis. This results in different effective tax rates depending on the way in which goods and services are purchased and the characteristics of both the products and the sellers. We discuss the arguments for the destination principle as the appropriate place-of-taxation rule for consumption taxation of cross-border trade. We analyze various recent reforms to the Value Added Tax in the European Union in response to e-commerce. We then examine various policy options in the United States – maintaining the status quo, changing nexus rules, states adopting information reporting, and national reforms that require firms to remit taxes regardless of physical presence – and relate them to the recent European reforms. We conclude based on our analysis and the recent European Union experience that reforms at the national level appear to be the important next step to enforcing commodity taxes at destination in the U.S.

The Eurasian Economic Union: a case of reproductive integration?

The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) appeared in January 2015 as the latest and most ambitious attempt at reconnecting the post-Soviet space. Building on the Customs Union between Belarus, Russia, and Kazakhstan (2010), and successfully extending membership to Armenia and Kyrgyzstan (2015), the EAEU not only connects a market of over 182 million people, but has the stated aim of utilizing European Union experience to achieve deep integration in a fraction of the time. Based on original fieldwork conducted in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia, this article examines the kind of integration project currently under construction, as well as the EAEU’s ability to make a significant impact in the region. As argued, despite early achievements, the EAEU is very much limited to reproducing sovereignty rather than transforming it, marking a clear disconnect between rhetoric and reality. Moreover, when viewed from the perspective of the three “I”s – institutions, identity, and international context – even this modest reality faces significant barriers.

China's water environmental management towards institutional integration. A review of current progress and constraints vis-a-vis the European experience

In recent years, China has launched ambitious measures to tackle water pollution. As political commitment and public investment soared, Chinese environmental scientists and practitioners have engaged in a substantial debate on the reorganization of the country's water management system. Domestic discussion has largely revolved around best practices adopted abroad, particularly in the European Union (EU), where the Water Framework Directive (WFD) has introduced an integrated management model based on the core concept of unity of the water cycle. This paper seeks to contribute to this debate, by appraising the regulatory, administrative, monitoring, and public participation dimensions of China's water environmental management. Related progress and constraints are discussed in the evolving context of Chinese environmental policies, against the background of the relevant EU experience. Regulatory and administrative coordination and integration, and the adoption of a watershed-based management model, appear at present as essential prerequisites to overcome the fragmentation of China's water environmental management. Despite recent efforts in this direction, institutional rationalization is still hampered by the persistence of conflicting interests and attributions among government bodies concurring to law making and implementation.

The Integration Patterns in East Asia: A Test by the European Union Experience

The article focuses on a comparative analysis of the two modern centers of integration, Europe and East Asia. The author criticizes the Eurocentric theories of integration, analyzes the stages and features of integration projects in the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, identifying similarities and differences of the integration in the both international regions.

Labour demand in the EU and returns to scale: A production function approach

The paper tests the hypothesis that small member states of the European Union (EU) experience economies of scale constraints. This study adopts a production function approach, utilising data from the 27 differently sized EU member countries. The results confirm the hypothesis and indicate that larger EU member countries incur lower costs per unit of output produced when compared to the smaller ones. This finding has important implications for small EU member states, including that smaller countries have to overcome their economies of scale constraint in order to attain and maintain international competitiveness. This disadvantage is particularly relevant for small states, because these states tend to be highly dependent on international trade, in which case international competitiveness is a major issue.

Transformation of association of Southeast Asian nations into economic community modeled on European Union experience

Integration processes in Asia are led by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The European Union (EU) has been instrumental in mentoring the ASEAN integration process. The aim of this paper was to determine whether the effects of the ASEAN Economic Community will be equal with achievements of the EU. This research focuses on the economic dimension of regional cooperation in South East Asia. The paper relies on a large number of data that have been drawn from a variety of authoritative sources, including the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum, as well as the EU and ASEAN. The research results shows that ASEAN in integration process can rely on the EU integration experience, with consideration of fundamental differences between these two regions.

Translating Legislation: The European Union Experience

This article sets out to identify, from a practitioner's viewpoint, some of the features of legislation that make it difficult to translate.It is hard to determine precisely what legislation means because it generally forms part of a larger framework designed to regulate on a long-term basis situations which are often highly complex. Its provisions are expressed in a formal style and are divided into small discrete units. It is generally produced in a lengthy multilayered process involving many participantsThis article looks at the European Union language regime and its legislative process and legislative drafting and translation in the EU institutions. The EU has developed its own particular language which poses challenges to both drafters and translators.This article suggests that the EU translators need to take a cautious approach to the translation of legislation, making sure that they are familiar with all the drafting rules and approaching the task of interpreting the text in the source language as a lawyer would rather than as a linguist.

Introduction: Financial Markets (Re) Segmentation in the Euro Area

The stresses caused by the sovereign debt crisis that began in 2010 in the European Union (EU) had many consequences. Arguably one of the most important of those was the partial re-fragmentation of the euro area – the common EU currency arrangement – financial markets, highly integrated from the onset of the monetary union up until the crisis. Even if this seemingly was a temporary development that affected just a subset of euro area members, and perhaps even part of the necessary ‘growing pains’ of the European common currency framework, it implied very significant and still present costs. This symposium issue will address some of the different EU experiences during this period, highlighting how diverse this ‘segmentation’ process actually was.

Towards an Asymmetric European Union, Without an Asymmetric European Parliament

In the last few years, the European integration process has increasingly resorted to flexible mechanisms of co-operation and decision-making, involving only a limited number of European Union (EU) Member States. The economic and financial crisis itself - and above all the response of the EU to the crisis - has undoubtedly favoured the trend.These ongoing asymmetric mechanisms deeply challenge the supranational architecture upon which the EU experience is based, determining a major change in the formal role and powers of both the European and national institutions. In particular, the European Parliament is incapable of adapting its internal functioning to the asymmetric schemes. In order to contrast these trends, some hypotheses of reform have been formulated, aiming either at building a new institution, a sort of Euro-Parliament; or at adapting the internal organisation of the EP to ongoing asymmetric tendencies limiting the voting rights of MEPs.The essay challenges both these hypothesis, assuming that responding to the increasing asymmetries of the EU by making the existing institutions, above all the European Parliament, more asymmetric, would consistently endanger the cohesion of the Union and threaten the good functioning of its governing bodies. Rather, the approach should be based upon a re-consideration of the overall representative circuit upon which the EU is founded. This implies that an even more asymmetric EU will have to rely on its traditional channels of parliamentary representation: what will need to change is not related to the nature or the format of parliamentary representation, but rather to its operative patterns, which should count on strengthened cooperation among parliaments to accommodate asymmetric tendencies in the EU governance with flexible forms of interaction in the scrutiny of such procedures.

The effects and side‐effects of the EU emissions trading scheme

As many countries, regions, cities, and states implement emissions trading policies to limit CO2 emissions, they turn to the European Union's experience with its emissions trading scheme since 2005. As a prominent example of a regional carbon pricing policy, it has attracted significant attention from scholars interested in evaluating the effectiveness and impacts of emissions trading. Among the key difficulties faced by researchers is isolating the effect of the EU ETS on industry operation, investment, and pricing decisions from other dominant factors such as the financial crisis, and establishing credible counterfactual scenarios against this backdrop. This article reviews the evidence, focusing on two intended effects (emissions abatement and investment in low‐carbon technologies) as well as two side‐effects (profits and price impacts). We find that the EU ETS cut CO2 emissions by 40–80 million t/year on average, or 2–4% of the total capped, while the evidence on innovation and investment impacts is inconclusive. There is strong empirical support for cost‐pass through in electricity (20–100%), in diesel and gasoline (>50%), and some preliminary evidence of pricing power in other industrial sectors. Windfall profits have amounted to billions of Euros, and concentrated in a few large companies.This article is categorized under: Climate Economics > Economics of Mitigation The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Policies, Instruments, Lifestyles, Behavior Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance

Libya’s IAS/IFRS Adoption and Accounting Quality: What Lessons from the European Union Experience

This study provides a review of the literature on adoption of IAS/IFRS in Libya, the time the IFRS standards decision is made in EU countries and the time IAS/IFRS adoption becomes undertaking in Libyan economy. The adoption of IAS/IFRS in Europe on the quality of financial reporting is an example of accounting standardisation among countries with different institutional frameworks and implementation rules. Impacts of this adoption in Libya will gain many benefit include the improve quality of financial reporting, less earnings management, more comparability, and provide more reliable, accurate, transparency, and high relevance for stock price determination of financial accounting information. These findings could be fruitful and helpful for outside users of accounting reports and also for regulators and legislators in their attempts to constrain the incidence of earnings accounting practises and to enhance the quality of accounting information. To explore the relevance (applicability) of international accounting standards to developing countries such as Libya is a topic of significant interest amongst disclosure (non-accounting information) users. This is a key subject for standard setting purposes as IAS/IFRS have been adopted in many different nations all over the world, and many others are likely to adopt them in the near future (including, Libya). Finally the main limitations of this study are outlined and opportunities for future research are discussed, particularly in relation to this study’s findings about the requirement to reconsider the usefulness of the relationship between accounting practices and framework adoption of IAS/IFRS in Libya.

Optimum currency areas: EU case

The interest for optimum currency area theory (OCA), comes from the experience of European monetary union (EMU), development of academic thought, progress in economic theory and econometrics in sense of revaluation of national monetary and fiscal policies and endogenousity of OCA criteria. Sovereign debts in European Union (EU) and evident disparities between member states, raising the question of economic validity of EU in course of generating more costs then gains for member states. OCA theory can, to some extent, provide a framework, which can be used for giving the answer to previous question. OCA criteria are used for that analysis. In this paper, there is historical and theoretical description of origin of this theory, from Mundell - the author of this idea in 1961., as well as the evolution of this theory through the development of criteria and their analysis on EMU. These criteria are used for assessment is a country fit to join a OCA, as well the functioning of one OCA, like EMU or some new in the future.

A need for harmonized legislation: perspectives in South America

The harmonization of national food standards in South America has been undertaken by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay within the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR). Since food is among the most important commodities traded internationally, the harmonization of national food standards has been considered a priority. MERCOSUR countries have different laws governing food that are based, among other things, on historical, cultural and economic factors. Some regulations are complex and contain many controls while others are less developed and lack basic requirements. As a consequence, from the inception of preparing a common legislation through its adoption by the member countries, a long and difficult task has been foreseen. Although not immediately apparent, the difficulty in achieving consensus within MERCOSUR is not unlike that experience by the members of the European Union. Currently, food harmonization within MERCOSUR has been reached for issues where technical standards may represent serious trade barriers. These decisions have been based on Codex limentarius Commission guidelines and recommendations as well as on the European Union experience. This article will briefly discuss the current status of the MERCOSUR harmonization process with focus on issues related to food safety. A historical background of MERCOSUR and its institutional structure are included.

Does Antidumping Address 'Unfair' Trade? The European Union's Experience

While antidumping laws were originally developed as the international trade analogue of domestic competition or antitrust policies, most vestiges of competition policy disappeared early in their evolution. Nonetheless, the formal justification for modern antidumping practice remains founded on the bedrock of countering “unfair” trading practices and preserving competitive markets. Consistent with this formal rationale, antidumping law has been replaced by competition policy mechanisms in some instances, such as in the European Union’s internal market and in a number of bilateral free trade agreements. We update and consolidate a relatively thin literature that has examined this issue formally. Adapting the established methodology, we develop a “likelihood of predatory practice” index which categorizes antidumping cases in line with the probability that they indeed constitute cases of predatory behavior which might legitimately have triggered competition policy actions had they occurred in a domestic market context. We apply this index to the European Union’s use of antidumping proceedings in its extra-EU trade over the period 2001 to 2010. Overall, we find more instances than previous studies where the EU antidumping measures address cases which would attract competition policy actions, although these are still a minority.

Measuring Innovative Capacities of the Georgia Regions

European Union (EU) experience reveal that the composite indicators are probably the most useful instruments for measuring the innovative capacities at the regional (sub-national) level. However, some gap exists in the current literature with respect to the elaboration of composite indicators for regional innovation systems (RISs) of developing countries. This article introduces the composite indicators GRIS and GCLS for measuring the regional innovative capacities (for GNUTS1 and GNUTS2 territorial classification levels, respectively). Georgia is a useful case-subject because its smallscale developing economy presents special challenges for elaborating the composite indicators for RISs. This article also includes a brief analysis using these composite indicators and indicates the significant heterogeneity among the innovative capacities of the Georgian regions.

Leniency Programme of the Competition Commission of Pakistan: Improvement is Indeed Essential

Leniency programmes have been used as an effective investigative tool world-wide, however Pakistan's leniency regime has not been able to reach that triumph in cracking cartels. The article aims to highlight noteworthy characteristics of the contemporary leniency programme of Pakistan underscoring legal mechanisms established by the competition regime of Pakistan to curtail cartels. The analysis will mainly focus on the system in Pakistan but will draw comparison with the leniency programme of the European Union, where appropriate. An appraisal of the effectiveness of the leniency programme of Pakistan in comparison with the European Union programme will be done in order to make possible recommendations for improvement of the leniency programme in Pakistan, based on the European Union experience.