Understanding today’s EU requires a prism which is attentive to the interactions between the polity-building and world-inhabiting facets of the emerging polity. We cannot separate developing a theory of the EU as a polity from determining its placement in the world. Norms of cooperation become...

Analysts of regional growth differences in the US tend to assume full spatial equilibrium (Glaeser et al, 1995). Flows of people thus indicate changes in the distribution of spatial welfare more effectively than differences in incomes. Research in Europe, however, shows that people tend to be...

International posting of workers and mobility of self-employed service suppliers lie between outright migration and trade in goods: their regulation, for both distributional and market correcting purposes, is not as difficult to harmonize as that of labour markets, but personal mobility is more...

The determinants of public spending composition have been studied from three broad perspectives in the scholarly literature: functional economic pressures, institutional constraints and party-political determinants. This paper engages with the third perspective by placing intra-governmental...

Many advanced economies around the world have recently witnessed a notable rise in populism stirring severe political unrest and social instability. This paper addresses the apparent academic confusion regarding the origins of this phenomenon and combines politico-economic analysis with...

I argue that the conflict that arose in Europe as a result of the Reformation and culminated in the Thirty Years' War persists to this day, as the two spirits corresponding respectively to Protestantism and Catholicism continue to divide us. Analyzing phenomena such as the Pepsi Challenge and...

This paper examines the prevalence of non-standard workers in EU-28, rules for accessing social security, and these workers' risk of not being able to access it. It focuses on temporary and part-time workers, and the self-employed, and offers a particularly detailed analysis of their access to...

Following Brexit, the rise of populist Eurosceptics across the EU, Central Eastern Europe's flirtation with 'illiberal democracy' and the sovereign debt crisis, which essentially still remains unresolved ten years after it started, even some of the EU's most enthusiastic supporters are today...

This paper examines how public sector outsourcing has performed in the UK, one of its leading exponents. It sets out the theoretical economic logic behind it, the unanticipated risks in its conception, and the deepening problems with its intensification. It shows how, when we put the market...