On 28 February, the EU agreed on a package imposing restrictive measures against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.
The sanctions include
- an embargo on arms, ammunition and equipment that could be used for the repression of protesters
- an assets freeze; and
- a visa ban on Colonel Gaddafi,…
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On Monday, 28 February 2011, the President of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, was received by Pope Benedict XVI at a private audience at the Vatican, Rome.
Source : © European Parliament
The European Commission today launches a public consultation on the “Europe 2020 Project Bond Initiative” which aims at boosting the funding of projects with long-term revenue potential in line with the Europe 2020 policy priorities. This follows the announcement made by President José Manuel Barroso in his State of the Union Address. Its objective is to help the private project companies to attract capital market funding from investors such as pension funds and insurance companies. The Europe 2020 Project Bond initiative has been identified in the Annual Growth Survey as a priority measure to enhance growth.
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The eHealth Strategies study analyses policy development and planning, implementation measures as well as progress achieved with respect to national and regional eHealth solutions in EU and EEA Member States, with emphasis on barriers and enablers beyond technology. The focus is on infrastructure elements and selected solutions emphasised in the European eHealth Action Plan of 2004.
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Published on:
28 February 2011
This Guidance of EFSA provides instructions on how to identify and select “scientific peer-reviewed open literature” and how to report it in a dossier, as required by Article 8(5) of Regulation (EC) No 1107/2009 on the placing of plant protection products on the market. The EFSA Guidance is intended for: (1) applicants submitting dossiers on active substances of plant protection products under Regulation (EC) No 1107/2009; (2) EU Member States’ competent authorities evaluating the dossiers and preparing the draft assessment reports; and (3) the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), responsible for drawing conclusions on the dossiers. This EFSA Guidance provides a definition of scientific peer-reviewed open literature and instructions on how to minimise bias in the identification, selection and inclusion of peer-reviewed open literature in dossiers, according to the principles of systematic review (i.e. methodological rigour, transparency, reproducibility). The EFSA Guidance is compatible with existing OECD Guidance documents for the preparation of active substances dossiers.
Published on:
28 February 2011
The European Food Safety Authority was asked to provide scientific advice on two studies, namely a carcinogenicity study in mice (Soffritti et al., 2010) and a prospective cohort study on the association between intakes of artificially sweetened soft drinks and preterm delivery (Halldorsson et al., 2010) and to conclude on the need to revise previous evaluations of aspartame or of the other sweeteners authorised in the European Union. The study by Soffritti et al. (2010) is a long-term carcinogenicity study in mice with transplacental exposure to the artificial sweetener aspartame. The authors concluded that, based on their results, aspartame induces cancer in the livers and lungs of male Swiss mice. EFSA has evaluated this carcinogenicity study and has concluded that, on the basis of the information available in the publication, the validity of the study and its statistical approach cannot be assessed and that its results cannot be interpreted. Furthermore, in view of the generally recognised lack of relevance for human risk assessment of the type of tumours observed in Swiss mice when they are induced by non-genotoxic compounds, EFSA concluded that the results presented in Soffritti et al. (2010) do not provide a sufficient basis to reconsider the previous evaluations by EFSA on aspartame. Halldorsson et al. (2010) investigated preterm delivery in a cohort of 59 334 pregnant women. The authors concluded that their results show an association between intake of artificially sweetened soft drinks and preterm delivery in the cohort. EFSA assessed this study and concluded that there is no evidence available to support a causal relationship between the consumption of artificially sweetened soft drinks and preterm delivery and that additional studies are required to reject or confirm an association. Overall, EFSA concluded that the information available from the Soffritti et al. (2010) and Halldorsson et al. (2010) publications do not give reason to reconsider the previous evaluations of aspartame or of other food additive sweeteners authorised in the European Union.
Europeans will be able to ask their governments to prohibit the cultivation of Genetically Modified Organisms in their country if a new EU regulation is adopted according to French MEP Corinne Lepage (ALDE). Her draft report (on the Commission’s proposal modifying a 2001 Directive) which could allow governments to restrict or prohibit the cultivation of GMOs will be debated in the Environment Committee on Monday (28 February) from 1500 CET. You can watch the meeting live!
Source : © European Parliament
The Committee of the Regions is gaining support for its idea of forging "territorial pacts" to facilitate the implementation of the 'Europe 2020' strategy at regional and local level.
In 2010, 1.6 billion nights were spent in hotels and similar establishments in the EU27, an increase of 2.8% compared with 2009, after two successive annual declines of 0.3% in 2008 and 3.7% in 2009. In the EU27, the number of hotel nights spent by residents in their own country rose by 1.1% and hotel nights spent by
non-residents grew by 5.1% in 2010.
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Euro area annual inflation was 2.3% in January 2011, up from 2.2% in December 2010. A year earlier the rate was 0.9%. Monthly inflation was -0.7% in January 2011.
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The European Ombudsman, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, has asked the European Commission to make an ex-gratia payment of EUR 1 500 to each of several students from outside the European Union, who participated in the EU scholarship programme Erasmus Mundus I. This follows a complaint from a Canadian student who claimed that he and his fellow students, who followed a Master’s Course in Aeronautics and Space Technology, had been misinformed about the financial aspects of their scholarship.
Canadian student complained about Erasmus Mundus scholarship
The Erasmus Mundus programme is an EU-funded exchange programme for students from outside the European Union, wh
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(JEL: D11, D12, D14) We test the interest rate sensitivity of subprime credit card borrowers using a unique panel data set from a UK credit card company. What is novel about our contribution is that we were given details of a randomized interest rate experiment conducted by the lender between October 2006 and January 2007. We find that individuals who tend to utilize their credit limits fully do not reduce their demand for credit when subject to increases in interest rates as high as 3 percentage points. This finding is naturally interpreted as evidence of binding liquidity constraints. We also demonstrate the importance of truly exogenous variation in interest rates when estimating credit demand elasticities. We show that estimating a standard credit demand equation with nonexperimental variation leads to seriously biased estimates even when conditioning on a rich set of controls and individual fixed effects. In particular, this procedure results in a large and statistically significant 3-month elasticity of credit card debt with respect to interest rates even though the experimental estimate of the same elasticity is neither economically nor statistically different from zero.
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(JEL: C25, D14) Using a new nationally representative survey of financial capability and experience in the UK and Ireland, I investigate the key factors that cause individuals to experience financial distress. In this context, a key area that I focus on is whether individuals’ behavioural traits, such as their capacities for self-control, planning, and patience, affect their ability to stay out of financial trouble. I find that the variables that proxy for these behavioural characteristics are both statistically significant and economically important for predicting both mild and extreme forms of financial distress, in a regression controlling for demographic and socio-economic factors. Furthermore, behavioural traits emerge as having a stronger impact on the incidence of financial distress than education or financial literacy. The results raise questions about whether policy can be oriented towards improving financial habits and mitigating the impact of behavioural characteristics on personal finances.
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(JEL: D31, F22) This paper analyses the existence of an immigrant/native wealth gap by using household survey data for Luxembourg, Germany and Italy. The results show that, in all three countries, a sizeable wealth gap exists between natives and immigrants. Towards the upper tail of the wealth distribution the gap narrows to a small extent. This gap persists even after controlling for demographic characteristics, country of origin, cohort and age at migration although cross-country differences exist in the immigration penalty.
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(JEL: C230, D140, D310, D910, H240) We study taxable wealth in unique Swedish administrative data, annually following a large sample of households over a period of almost 40 years. The main data limitation is non-observability of wealth for those below the tax exemption level. This implies that much of the focus of the paper is on the rich, since we are confined to those whose wealth becomes taxable over time. We exploit the long panel dimension by estimating dynamic ‘fixed effects’ models for limited dependent variables that allow for individual heterogeneity in both constants and autoregressive parameters, and control for heterogeneity through observables. We find substantial wealth mobility over the long time spans, partly accounted for by life-cycle behavior, while sufficiently capturing dynamics by an AR(1) process at the individual level.
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(JEL: D31, J15) We found that on average over the period from 1989 to 2007, 21 percent of American households at a given point of time received a wealth transfer and these accounted for 23 percent of their net worth. Over the lifetime, about 30 percent of households could expect to receive a wealth transfer and these would account for close to 40 percent of their net worth near time of death. However, there is little evidence of an inheritance “boom.” In fact, from 1989 to 2007, the share of households reporting a wealth transfer fell by 2.5 percentage points. The average value of inheritances received among all households did increase but at a slow pace, by 10 percent, and wealth transfers as a proportion of current net worth fell sharply over this period from 29 to 19 percent or by 10 percentage points. We also found, somewhat surprisingly, that inheritances and other wealth transfers tend to be equalizing in terms of the distribution of household wealth. Indeed, the addition of wealth transfers to other sources of household wealth has had a sizeable effect on reducing the inequality of wealth.
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(JEL: D91, D14, G11) We study how and to what extent private households are affected by the recent financial crisis and how their financial decisions are influenced by this shock. Our analysis reveals that individuals with low levels of financial literacy are less likely to have invested in the stock market and thus are less likely to report losses in wealth. Yet, individuals with low financial literacy are more likely to sell their assets which lost in value (realize losses). This reaction to short-term losses has potential long-term consequences if individuals do not participate in markets’ recovery and face lower returns in the long run.
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(JEL: H31, E62, C83) Recent fiscal policies have aimed to stimulate household spending. In 2008, most households received one-time economic stimulus payments. In 2009, most working households received the Making Work Pay tax credit in the form of reduced withholding; other households, mainly retirees, received one-time payments. This paper quantifies the spending response to these different policies and examines whether the spending response differed according to whether the stimulus was delivered as a one-time payment or as a flow of payments in the form of reduced withholding. Based on responses from a representative sample of households in the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, the paper finds that the reduction in withholding led to a substantially lower rate of spending than the one-time payments. Specifically, 25 percent of households reported that the one-time economic stimulus payment in 2008 led them to mostly increase their spending while only 13 percent reported that the extra pay from the lower withholding in 2009 led them to mostly increase their spending. The paper uses several approaches to isolate the effect of the delivery mechanism from the changing aggregate and individual conditions. Responses to a hypothetical stimulus in 2009, examination of “free responses” concerning differing responses to the policies, and regression analysis controlling for individual economic conditions and demographics all support the primary importance of the income delivery mechanism in determining the spending response to the policies.
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(JEL: D91, E91) Economic theory predicts that the consumption path of unconstrained homeowners responds to the interest rate, while the consumption path of credit constrained homeowners is determined by the size and timing of payments (mortgage maturity). We exploit the rapid expansion of mortgage markets during the last decade in Spain and a very detailed survey on household finances to estimate group-specific consumption responses to changes in the credit conditions. Our estimates suggest that the consumption of households headed by an individual with high school respondsmore to mortgage maturity than to the interest rate spread. The consumption of the rest of indebted households is insensitive to loan maturity. Those results are confirmed when we instrument loan maturity exploiting the fact that banks are reluctant to offer contracts with age at maturity above 65. An interpretation of those results is that households headed by middle education individuals, 8% of our sample, behave as credit constrained.
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(JEL: E1, G2, D8) We introduce professional financial advice in households’ choice to hold risky financial assets. Consistent with the predictions from a formal model, we present evidence that households’ trust in financial advice only matters when their perceived own financial capability is low. Instead, for households with higher financial capability, only the perception of legal protection in financial markets matters for stock market participation. Our empirical analysis highlights economically significant differences in households’ perception of their rights as consumers of financial services, even when their objective circumstances should not be much different.
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(JEL: G2, G18, O16, P34) This paper uses survey data for 29,000 households from 29 transition economies to explore how the use of banking services is related to household characteristics, bank ownership structure and the development of the financial infrastructure. At the household level we find that the holding of a bank account or bank card increases with income, wealth and education in most countries and also find evidence for an urban-rural gap, as well as for a role of religion and social integration. Our results show that foreign bank ownership is associated with more bank accounts among high-wealth, high-income, and educated households. State ownership, on the other hand, does not induce financial inclusion of rural and poorer households. We find that higher deposit insurance coverage, better payment systems and creditor protection encourage the holding of bank accounts in particular by highincome and high-wealth households. All in all, our findings shed doubt on the ability of policy levers to broaden the financial system to disadvantaged groups.
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Summary of decision on complaint 3082/2009/MHZ against the European Commission
The complainant, a Polish student in her fourth year of studies, was not accepted to the Commission’s traineeship programme because she had not yet completed her studies. At the time, her university was in the process of adopting the ‘Bologna process’ rules. As a result, some students in her faculty were still studying under the previous system, which required five years of study before a (master’s) degree could be obtained. Some students were, however, studying under the new system and could obtain a bachelor’s degree after only three years.
The complainant considered that it would be fair for the Commission to take this situation int
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New Open Europe briefing: ECJ ruling could cost young women drivers an extra £4,300The European Court of Justice could tomorrow rule to scrap the insurance industry’s opt-out from the EU’s 2004 Gender Directive, which will mean insurers can no longer offer different products and prices to men and women based on their sex. The ECJ’s Advocate General has argued in a preliminary opinion in favour of removing the opt-out, since it constitutes gender-based discrimination.http://www.openeurope.org.uk/media-centre/summary.aspx?id=2545
Bank profits in Albania jump by 89%Data from Association of Banks showed that banking industry in Albania managed to increase profits by 89% during 2010 despite a strong slump in underperforming loans AENews reported.The profits jumped to €48 million while underperforming loans jumped to 14% of the total loan portfolio from 10.5% in 2009.Bank assets increased…http://www.neurope.eu/articles/105028.php
Crisis threatens Albanias EU future: KukanEduard Kukan head of the pean Parliaments delegation for relations with Southest recently stated that the longstanding political deadlock threatens Albanias European perspective AENews reported.Kukan confirmed that the debate held at the pean Parliament few weeks back earlier on Albania was constructive and demonstrated politicians determination to solve the crisis.However…http://www.neurope.eu/articles/105030.php
EUs Fuele to help Albania end stalemateMiroslav Lajcak EU envoy for the political crisis in Albania intends to call on the politicians in Tirana to invite EU Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fule to help resolve longstanding differences Aeews reported.Lajcak is urging both Prime Minister Sali Berisha and opposition leader Edi Rama to involve Fuele in ending the…http://www.neurope.eu/articles/105029.php
They promised you UK Military would remain independantMPs of all colours, time and time again made the promise to the British people that the British Military would remain independent, that there would never be an EU military. Well they lied. 13th Spitfire has posted an open letter … Continue reading →
http://pjcjournal.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/they-promised-you-uk-military-would-remain-independant/
Sandblasted: EU policy evaporates in the Saharan revolutionsThe Mediterranean is an absolute priority for Europe said Jose Barroso in 2008. This importance hasnrsquo;t been obvious recently as the European Union and its new External Action Service have been cast aside by popular revolts as the oppressed risk their lives for a society built on values the EU…http://www.neurope.eu/articles/104968.php
Inequality is morally wrong and uneconomicThe extreme inequality that global capitalism creates is not only morally and socially wrong. It also is a major obstacle to productivity and innovation. Economic dynamism is at stake.
The theory that inequality letrsquo;s people stretch to the ceiling is a myth that has been dismantled by tycoon John P. Morgan…http://www.neurope.eu/articles/104956.php
BIS delivers documents it said didn’t existIn the ongoing legal dispute with the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS), Andrew Withers has now been able to force them to deliver documents and internal memo’s that it previously had said ‘just didn’t exist’. In what can … Continue reading →
http://pjcjournal.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/bis-delivers-documents-it-said-didnt-exist/
The road to Rio – EU officially on the bandwagonThe RIO conferences began in 1992, as the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Convened by the original international green loon Maurice Strong, who also co-authored the ‘RIO’ concept as part of the Club of Rome. The latest conference, the … Continue reading →
http://pjcjournal.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/the-road-to-rio-eu-officially-on-the-bandwagon/
The 15th External Relations Working Group (ERWG) meeting took place in Warsaw, Poland, on 10-11 February 2011 in the presence of the Hungarian CEPOL Presidency and CEPOL’s Director. The Chair of the ERWG had the pleasure of welcoming two newcomers from Cyprus and Croatia, among the 19 participants to the meeting.
The ERWG made concrete and substantial progress on the finalisation of CEPOL’s External Relations Policy Paper, which is meant to respond to the opportunities and challenges for the European dimension of Law Enforcement training offered by the new EU Security Architecture, resulting from the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty and the implementation of the Stockholm Programme and its Action plan. With this in mind, the ERWG took note of recent EU Commission communications on Internal Security.
Recognising the important role played by its partner EU Agencies such as Europol, Frontex, Eurojust, the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) and others, the Committee on Internal Security (COSI), which CEPOL now regularly attends and the newly established European External Action Service (EEAS) alongside other key EU institutions and Partners as well as the Member States, the ERWG maintains its determination to advise qualitatively on how CEPOL can best serve this new European vision of security.
The ever growing importance of the Internal/External Security Nexus, the implementation of a European Law Enforcement Training Scheme, as well as the need to enhance the professional skills of EU Officers deployed to Civilian Crisis Management Operations are just examples of what CEPOL can contribute to.
The ERWG had the opportunity to discuss priorities for the years 2011 and 2012, which include, continuing the ongoing dialogue with Associated, Candidate and ENP countries as well as International and regional organisations. In particular, the ERWG reiterated the importance of concluding formal Cooperation Agreements with Switzerland, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania.
Cooperation with other strategic partners such as China and India was also discussed, with a view to examine the possibility of enhancing CEPOL’s engagement with these important interlocutors, either via formal agreements or in the framework of ad-hoc initiatives and projects financed by the EU. Establishing cooperation with Russia will be looked at in the course of 2011.
Future project opportunities and the involvement of CEPOL in EU Calls for Proposals and other financial assistance instruments were also discussed.
Importantly, the efforts made by CEPOL to better integrating itself within the cluster of EU Justice and Home Affairs were examined, and the positive progress made was noted.
The ERWG’s next meeting will be in Estonia (7-8 July 2011) and Romania (7-8 November 2011).
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