scholarly journals La reforma constitucional suiza : el origen de la "regla de oro fiscal"

Author(s):  
Mónica Arenas Ramiro

Si bien la crisis económica que estamos viviendo afecta a todos los Estados miembros de la Unión Europea, la manera de afrontarla de unos y otros varía considerablemente, sin que en ninguno de los casos parezcan producirse resultados óptimos. Por este motivo, desde la propia Unión, ante el peligro de que la ruptura económica y monetaria se produzca, se ha orientado el proceso de estabilidad fiscal aconsejando a sus Estados miembros introducir un límite al gasto público en sus textos constitucionales. Esta solución, adoptada por algunos países como Alemania, Francia, o España, ha sido recibida con cierta suspicacia y con pocas esperanzas. No obstante, este freno al endeudamiento público, esta «regla de oro fiscal», fue ya constitucionalizada por Suiza en el 2001 y los resultados son verdaderamente positivos. Su experiencia, y la semejanza con nuestra forma de organización territorial, puede arrojar un poco de luz a las medidas hasta ahora adoptadas.While the economic crisis affects all Member States in the European Union, the way to resist it varies considerably from each others, and nobody have the optimal results. For this reason, from the European Union faced with the danger of economic and monetary breakdown, has guided the process of fiscal stability recomending its Member States to introduce a debt brake in their national Constitutions. The solution adopted by countries like Germany, France, or Spain, has been greeted with suspicion and without hope. However, the public debt brake —the «financial golden rule»— was already constitutionalized by Switzerland in 2001 and the results were truly positive. His experience may shed some light on our steps.

Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kłos

The article is devoted to the issue of financing of operational programs implemented in Poland in the European Union’s financial perspectives 2000–2006 and 2007–2013. Polish membership in the European Union gives the opportunity to obtain additional funds but the possibility of absorption involves costs which Poland has to bear. The author attempts to assess the way in which Poland’s adopted systems for operational programs implemented with the participation of EU structural funds influenced the state of the public finances. System solutions used in Poland have implications for two key measures of the state of public fi nances such that is public debt and budget deficit.


Ekonomia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-73
Author(s):  
Mikołaj Mielczarek

The impact of contemporary economic crisis on public finances of the Visegrad GroupThe article attempts to assess the state of public finances of the Visegrad Group V4 during the contemporary economic crisis. At the beginning there are shown two faces of the economic crisis in the European Union and that this crisis firstly took the form of abanking crisis, and next extend to the public finance sector. Analysis of GDP proved that when we have crisis in the European Union in all V4 countries there has been adecline in the volume of GDP, and in the next years there were rather its growth. Analysis of the budget deficit showed that in 2008-2015 the V4 countries had problems in complying with the deficit below 3% of GDP. At the same time analysis of public debt showed that as aresult of the economic crisis public debt in the Visegrad Group had atendency to rather increase, but in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, it was less than 60% of GDP, while in Hungary exceeded 71% of GDP.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-220
Author(s):  
Giulio Allevato ◽  
Fernando Pastor-Merchante

The preliminary ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union in the Google Ireland case turned on the compatibility with the rules on free movement of some of the administrative arrangements put in place by Hungary in order to administer its controversial advertisement tax (namely, the obligation to register and the penalties attached to the failure to comply with that obligation). The preliminary ruling offers some interesting insights on the way in which the Court assesses the compatibility with the freedom to provide services of national administrative arrangements aimed at ensuring the effective collection of taxes. This is a topical issue in the context of the recent efforts made by Member States to tax the digital economy more effectively.


Author(s):  
Paul Craig

This chapter draws on the six dimensions of public law covered in the book: theory, institutions and accountability, constitutions and rights, process and procedure, legislation, and case law. It links discussion of these dimensions, by considering how they have been affected by Brexit. The chapter is not concerned with the contending arguments for leaving or remaining in the European Union. The focus is on the way in which Brexit has ‘pressure-tested’ the public law regime in the United Kingdom and the European Union. The six dimensions of public law that are discussed in the preceding chapters form the architectural frame through which the impact of Brexit on the public law regimes is assessed in both the United Kingdom and the European Union.


Author(s):  
Alexander Thiele

The historic financial crisis that began on the American housing market in 2007 and from there spread all over the globe had tremendous consequences for more or less every country worldwide, especially for their respective public finances. The overall public debt level skyrocketed due to the substantial economic downfall and the necessity to bail out hundreds of financial institutions that had suffered severe losses when the American subprime market collapsed and the money markets froze. Though the States were (with tremendous help by the European Central Bank) finally successful in preventing a complete breakdown of the major financial markets, their intervention left the national budgets and the balance of payments (BOP) of several of them in a devastating condition with insolvencies only being averted by massive external and mainly financial assistance by other States and institutions (especially the International Monetary Fund (IMF)). Some of these states facing such a financial calamity were Member States of the European Union (EU)—a fact having an important normative implication: Other Member States wanting to help financially were bound by the normative framework of the European Union Treaties. And the same was obviously true for the European Union itself where it wanted to initiate any form of (financial) assistance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (Supplement_4) ◽  
Author(s):  
H Larson ◽  
A de Figueiredo ◽  
E Karafllakis ◽  
M Rawal

Abstract Background High confidence in vaccination programmes is crucial for maintaining high coverage rates. Across the European Union (EU), however, vaccine delays and refusals are contributing to declining immunisation rates in a number of countries and are leading to increases in disease outbreaks. Methods We assessed the overall state of confidence in vaccines among the public in all 28 EU member states and among general practitioners (GP) in ten EU member states, conducting the largest ever study on attitudes to vaccines and vaccination in the EU, eliciting the views of approximately 28,000 respondents across the 28 EU member states. Results We found that a number of member states (including France, Greece, Italy, and Slovenia) have become more confident in the safety of vaccines since 2015, but that the Czech Republic, Finland, Poland, and Sweden have become less confident. While GPs generally hold higher levels of vaccine confidence than the public, the survey found that 36% of GPs surveyed in Czech Republic and 25% in Slovakia do not agree that the MMR vaccine is safe and 29% and 19% respectively do not believe it is important. Countries whose GPs hold higher confidence in vaccines tend to have a larger proportion of the public expressing positive vaccination beliefs. Conclusions Even countries with well-established vaccination programmes and high levels of confidence are not immune to rising vaccine hesitancy. There is a need for continuous monitoring, preparedness and response plans to maintain and increase confidence in the importance, effectiveness and safety of vaccines, among both the public and health professionals.


Author(s):  
Katrin Auel

The role and position of national parliaments in European Union (EU) affairs have undergone a long, slow, and sometimes rocky, but overall rather remarkable, development. Long regarded as the victims of the integration process, they have continuously strengthened their institutional prerogatives and have become more actively involved in EU affairs. Since the Lisbon Treaty, national parliaments even have a formal and direct role in the European legislative process, namely, as guardians of the EU’s subsidiarity principle via the so-called early warning system. To what extent institutional provisions at the national or the European level provide national parliaments with effective means of influencing EU politics is still a largely open question. On the one hand, national parliaments still differ with regard to their institutional prerogatives and actual engagement in EU politics. On the other hand, the complex decision-making system of the EU, with its multitude of actors involved, makes it difficult to trace outcomes back to the influence of specific actors. Yet it is precisely this opacity of the EU policymaking process that has led to an emphasis on the parliamentary communication function and the way national parliaments can contribute to the democratic legitimacy of the EU by making EU political decisions and processes more accessible and transparent for the citizens. This deliberative aspect is also often emphasized in approaches to the role of national parliaments in the EU that challenge the territorially defined, standard account of parliamentary representation. Taking the multilevel character of the EU as well as the high degree of political and economic interdependence between the member states into account, parliamentary representation is conceptualized as extending beyond the nation-state and as shared across the EU, with a strong emphasis on the links between parliaments through inter-parliamentary cooperation and communication as well as on the representation of other member states’ citizens interests and concerns in parliamentary debates. Empirical research is still scarce, but existing studies provide evidence for the development of an increasingly dense web of formal and informal interactions between parliaments and for changes in the way national parliamentarians represent citizens in EU affairs.


10.4335/171 ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lenka Horváthová ◽  
Julius Horváth ◽  
Vladimír Gazda ◽  
Matúš Kubák

This paper analyses the relationship between fiscal decentralization and the level of the public debt in the twenty seven member countries of the European Union. Our panel data analysis points to the importance of size as fiscal decentralization reduces public debt in large and small countries, but not in medium - size countries. In addition, our results show that the number of government levels and average size of the lowest government unit is insignificant with respect to the public debt in these countries.


elni Review ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 79-82
Author(s):  
Ana Barreira

The European Commission has recognised that “[l]aws do not serve their full purpose unless they are properly applied and enforced”. In addition “[t]he European Institutions and the Member States should continue to develop their work to ensure that Community law is correctly applied and implemented”. There are diverse tools for guaranteeing compliance such as compliance indicators, compliance and enforcement strategies and environmental inspections, the purpose of which is to supervise compliance. This article focuses on the latter. Firstly, the way in which this instrument was incorporated under Community environmental policy is examined. Secondly, the current status of environmental inspections at EU level is briefly analysed. Thereafter, it will concentrate on the proposals for the review of this tool, ending with some recommendations on how environmental inspections should be regulated in the European Union with a focus on the demands of European Environmental Bureau (EEB) on this matter.


2008 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin C. Williams

PurposeThis paper seeks to analyse the various approaches being used by the public sector across the European Union to tackle undeclared work and to evaluate the direction of change.Design/methodology/approachTo do this, the National Action Plans for Employment 2001 and 2003 (NAPs) and the National Reform Programmes 2005‐2008 (NRPs) are analysed, along with the data collected in international reviews conducted by the European Employment Observatory in Autumn 2004 and the European Industrial Relations Observatory (EIRO) in 2005 on undeclared work.FindingsIn parallel with public sector management in other realms, where it is accepted that positive reinforcement of “good” behaviour is more effective at eliciting change than negative reinforcement of “bad” behaviour, the finding is that the public sector in EU member states is moving away from solely a repressive approach that seeks to detect and penalise offenders and towards an approach that also seeks to stimulate good behaviour by rewarding compliance. Until now, however, these positive reinforcement measures appear to remain firmly entrenched in a bureaucratic management approach that uses externally imposed direct control systems to generate reactive behaviours, rather than an internalised post‐bureaucratic approach that seeks to generate constructive pro‐activity and commitment to tax morality on the part of populations.Originality/valueThis is one of the first attempts to evaluate how public sector management is tackling undeclared work in European member states.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document