This article argues that the EU response to the pandemic, the Next Generation EU (NGEU), dubbed a “Hamiltonian moment” for Europe, can be better understood if compared to the US under the Articles of Confederation. The key aspect of the original Hamiltonian moment was the assumption of states’ debts after the Union was given tax power. None of this happened with the NGEU. The EU was not given any significant new sources of revenue, apart from some environmental levies, and was only allowed to borrow more on the financial markets to finance new fiscal solidarity mechanisms. In the US, this kind of borrowing power gave rise to monetary financing of the debt and enormous inflation. Instead of backing the enlarged borrowing powers with a fiscalization process leading to tax powers, the EU created a hybrid system of temporary, limited quasi-fiscalization in the form of the NGEU, which has legitimacy gaps. Simultaneously, the EU introduced enhanced fiscal regulation with conditionalities in the form of the new European Semester (an annual EU cycle of economic and fiscal coordination) tied to the allocation of the NGEU funds. Additionally, the EU has only promised to work in the future on various forms of revenue needed to pay the new debt. Hence, I will show that the NGEU could be better described as a “Morrisian moment” for Europe, as Robert Morris, the superintendent of finance of the US (1781–1784), was the very first finance minister of a similar kind of a union, with the power to borrow but no power to tax, governed by the unanimity rule in fiscal matters, which led to the failure of his proposals for national revenue.
{"title":"No Borrowing Without Taxing? Fiscal Solidarity of Next Generation EU in Light of the American Experience","authors":"Tomasz P. Woźniakowski","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7233","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that the EU response to the pandemic, the Next Generation EU (NGEU), dubbed a “Hamiltonian moment” for Europe, can be better understood if compared to the US under the Articles of Confederation. The key aspect of the original Hamiltonian moment was the assumption of states’ debts after the Union was given tax power. None of this happened with the NGEU. The EU was not given any significant new sources of revenue, apart from some environmental levies, and was only allowed to borrow more on the financial markets to finance new fiscal solidarity mechanisms. In the US, this kind of borrowing power gave rise to monetary financing of the debt and enormous inflation. Instead of backing the enlarged borrowing powers with a fiscalization process leading to tax powers, the EU created a hybrid system of temporary, limited quasi-fiscalization in the form of the NGEU, which has legitimacy gaps. Simultaneously, the EU introduced enhanced fiscal regulation with conditionalities in the form of the new European Semester (an annual EU cycle of economic and fiscal coordination) tied to the allocation of the NGEU funds. Additionally, the EU has only promised to work in the future on various forms of revenue needed to pay the new debt. Hence, I will show that the NGEU could be better described as a “Morrisian moment” for Europe, as Robert Morris, the superintendent of finance of the US (1781–1784), was the very first finance minister of a similar kind of a union, with the power to borrow but no power to tax, governed by the unanimity rule in fiscal matters, which led to the failure of his proposals for national revenue.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"292 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136233425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thanks to the recovery fund Next Generation EU, the EU considerably increased the size of its fiscal capacity by increasing its borrowing power. Yet, the post-pandemic EU has left the key issue of how to distribute fiscal sovereignty across the EU and the member states unsolved. Departing from influential concepts in the political science literature, this article argues that we still lack a thorough analytical framework to operationalise the coexistence of two fiscal sovereignties—the fiscal sovereignty of the centre (here, the EU) and the fiscal sovereignty of the units (here, the member states). By resorting to comparative federalism, the article first operationalises fiscal sovereignty as the power to collect, administer, and spend resources. A level of government (the centre or the units) is fiscally sovereign if it can decide on its revenues, the administration of its resources, and its expenditures alone or together with the other level of government (what I call “fiscal self- or co-determination”). The coexistence of fiscal sovereignties becomes impossible if one level systematically and unilaterally encroaches upon the other (“fiscal out-determination”), as is still the case with the post-pandemic EU. On the contrary, in a union of states by aggregation like the EU—namely, Switzerland—the centre (Confederation) has its own fiscal powers, while the units (cantons) retain most of their fiscal sovereignty: The coexistence of fiscal sovereignties is thus possible. The article concludes by outlining which “fiscal features” of the Swiss system could not work in the EU and which could instead potentially work.
{"title":"The Coexistence of Fiscal Sovereignties: The Post‐Pandemic European Union in Comparative Perspective","authors":"Tiziano Zgaga","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7244","url":null,"abstract":"Thanks to the recovery fund Next Generation EU, the EU considerably increased the size of its fiscal capacity by increasing its borrowing power. Yet, the post-pandemic EU has left the key issue of how to distribute fiscal sovereignty across the EU and the member states unsolved. Departing from influential concepts in the political science literature, this article argues that we still lack a thorough analytical framework to operationalise the coexistence of two fiscal sovereignties—the fiscal sovereignty of the centre (here, the EU) and the fiscal sovereignty of the units (here, the member states). By resorting to comparative federalism, the article first operationalises fiscal sovereignty as the power to collect, administer, and spend resources. A level of government (the centre or the units) is fiscally sovereign if it can decide on its revenues, the administration of its resources, and its expenditures alone or together with the other level of government (what I call “fiscal self- or co-determination”). The coexistence of fiscal sovereignties becomes impossible if one level systematically and unilaterally encroaches upon the other (“fiscal out-determination”), as is still the case with the post-pandemic EU. On the contrary, in a union of states by aggregation like the EU—namely, Switzerland—the centre (Confederation) has its own fiscal powers, while the units (cantons) retain most of their fiscal sovereignty: The coexistence of fiscal sovereignties is thus possible. The article concludes by outlining which “fiscal features” of the Swiss system could not work in the EU and which could instead potentially work.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"22 11","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136233429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Patricia Garcia-Duran, L. Johan Eliasson, Oriol Costa
Mercantilist policies, protectionism, Chinese and US violations of the spirit—if not always the rules—of the World Trade Organization, along with supply chain vulnerabilities, trade wars, and illegal state subsidies have all contributed to a rise in the weaponisation of commerce (using trade in response to, or to achieve, political decisions or acts) across the globe. The weaponisation and geo-politicisation of trade pose a challenge for the EU, which is poorly suited for a game of power politics. Its common commercial policy developed separately from the intergovernmental foreign and security policy. The level of exclusive EU competence differs across the two policy domains, as do decision-making processes. Drawing on work addressing ideational and instrumental levels of policy, we discuss how the EU is assessing the international environment through the ideational framework of strategic autonomy, and how this has shaped the construction of new trade defence instruments intended to protect against economic and technology-related security risks. Focusing specifically on trade defence instruments addressing security concerns, which are justified in the 2023 European Economic Security Strategy (especially in the pillar focusing on protecting against economic security risks), we show that the distinction between commercial policy and traditional security concerns is eroding.
{"title":"Commerce and Security Meet in the European Union’s Trade Defence Instruments","authors":"Patricia Garcia-Duran, L. Johan Eliasson, Oriol Costa","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7030","url":null,"abstract":"Mercantilist policies, protectionism, Chinese and US violations of the spirit—if not always the rules—of the World Trade Organization, along with supply chain vulnerabilities, trade wars, and illegal state subsidies have all contributed to a rise in the weaponisation of commerce (using trade in response to, or to achieve, political decisions or acts) across the globe. The weaponisation and geo-politicisation of trade pose a challenge for the EU, which is poorly suited for a game of power politics. Its common commercial policy developed separately from the intergovernmental foreign and security policy. The level of exclusive EU competence differs across the two policy domains, as do decision-making processes. Drawing on work addressing ideational and instrumental levels of policy, we discuss how the EU is assessing the international environment through the ideational framework of strategic autonomy, and how this has shaped the construction of new trade defence instruments intended to protect against economic and technology-related security risks. Focusing specifically on trade defence instruments addressing security concerns, which are justified in the 2023 European Economic Security Strategy (especially in the pillar focusing on protecting against economic security risks), we show that the distinction between commercial policy and traditional security concerns is eroding.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"179 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135883271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 2017, Italy, France, and Germany jointly supported the setting up of an EU-wide investment screening mechanism to strengthen the EU’s capacity to screen and eventually block foreign investments. In a few months, however, the Italian government changed position dramatically, shifting from leading supporter to staunchest opposer of this pol-icy initiative. Such a change of positioning was decisive in both watering down the initial proposal and moving for-ward with the idea of a looser mechanism coordinating national investment screening activities. This article develops an explanation of the Italian government’s changing negotiating stance. We develop an argument that stresses how two factors combined to produce this puzzling outcome. First, we stress the role of political parties as drivers of governments’ foreign economic policy choices. More specifically, we show that the preferences of the parties form-ing the Italian government after the 2018 general elections (the Lega Nord and the Five Star Movement) were crucial in shaping Italy’s evolving stance on this important issue. Second, we highlight the implications of the tension that exists between two different “varieties” of anti-globalism. While “self-proclaimed” anti-globalist political parties usu-ally combine a traditional critique of globalization and opposition to further political integration in the EU, they may be forced to prioritize one over the other when they prove incompatible. In this context, we show how Italian anti-globalist parties’ choice to prioritize anti-Europeanism over anti-globalism led them to prefer strengthening domes-tic-level institutions to screen FDIs rather than allowing the EU to acquire new powers.
{"title":"Varieties of Anti‐Globalism: The Italian Government’s Evolving Stance on the EU’s Investment Screening Mechanism","authors":"Antonio Calcara, Arlo Poletti","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7037","url":null,"abstract":"In 2017, Italy, France, and Germany jointly supported the setting up of an EU-wide investment screening mechanism to strengthen the EU’s capacity to screen and eventually block foreign investments. In a few months, however, the Italian government changed position dramatically, shifting from leading supporter to staunchest opposer of this pol-icy initiative. Such a change of positioning was decisive in both watering down the initial proposal and moving for-ward with the idea of a looser mechanism coordinating national investment screening activities. This article develops an explanation of the Italian government’s changing negotiating stance. We develop an argument that stresses how two factors combined to produce this puzzling outcome. First, we stress the role of political parties as drivers of governments’ foreign economic policy choices. More specifically, we show that the preferences of the parties form-ing the Italian government after the 2018 general elections (the Lega Nord and the Five Star Movement) were crucial in shaping Italy’s evolving stance on this important issue. Second, we highlight the implications of the tension that exists between two different “varieties” of anti-globalism. While “self-proclaimed” anti-globalist political parties usu-ally combine a traditional critique of globalization and opposition to further political integration in the EU, they may be forced to prioritize one over the other when they prove incompatible. In this context, we show how Italian anti-globalist parties’ choice to prioritize anti-Europeanism over anti-globalism led them to prefer strengthening domes-tic-level institutions to screen FDIs rather than allowing the EU to acquire new powers.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135883700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The past three decades have seen the entry and increased influence of radical right parties into the European party landscape. These parties harness disaffection with the status quo by appealing to nativist or authoritarian tendencies in the electorate. Their policies often center around the protection of the “common man” from foreign or elite forces (particularly, cultural and economic globalization) and their emergence has been linked to decreasing support for globalization—the so-called “globalization backlash.” Several authors note that although radical right parties advocate economic protectionism to attract voters, who are disaffected by globalization, they say little about how this is manifested in advocacy of concrete policy measures. This speaks to the need for more systematic study of the trade policies of radical right parties. This article studies the Swedish radical right party, the Sweden Democrats (ostensibly free traders), to advance an argument based on the core ideology of radical right parties, nativism, and populism. In doing so, the article contributes to the literature that stresses cultural rather than economic foundations for opposition to globalization. Moreover, this article widens the definition of protectionism from that germane to the literature on radical right parties to include non-tariff barriers to trade (in addition to tariffs and quotas), providing a more up-to-date and multifaceted account of the range of trade policy instruments that radical right parties may advocate. I find that populism inspires advocacy of liberal trade policies, while nativism inspires protectionist trade policies. Protectionism almost exclusively consists of non-tariff barriers.
{"title":"Free Trade‐Populism and Nativist‐Protectionism: Trade Policy and the Sweden Democrats","authors":"Alexander Dannerhäll","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7066","url":null,"abstract":"The past three decades have seen the entry and increased influence of radical right parties into the European party landscape. These parties harness disaffection with the status quo by appealing to nativist or authoritarian tendencies in the electorate. Their policies often center around the protection of the “common man” from foreign or elite forces (particularly, cultural and economic globalization) and their emergence has been linked to decreasing support for globalization—the so-called “globalization backlash.” Several authors note that although radical right parties advocate economic protectionism to attract voters, who are disaffected by globalization, they say little about how this is manifested in advocacy of concrete policy measures. This speaks to the need for more systematic study of the trade policies of radical right parties. This article studies the Swedish radical right party, the Sweden Democrats (ostensibly free traders), to advance an argument based on the core ideology of radical right parties, nativism, and populism. In doing so, the article contributes to the literature that stresses cultural rather than economic foundations for opposition to globalization. Moreover, this article widens the definition of protectionism from that germane to the literature on radical right parties to include non-tariff barriers to trade (in addition to tariffs and quotas), providing a more up-to-date and multifaceted account of the range of trade policy instruments that radical right parties may advocate. I find that populism inspires advocacy of liberal trade policies, while nativism inspires protectionist trade policies. Protectionism almost exclusively consists of non-tariff barriers.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135883825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Which companies gain and which companies lose from trade agreements? In contrast to a view that sees the largest companies as the main beneficiaries of trade agreements, we argue that medium-sized companies gain the most from them. Moreover, we examine whether more capital-intensive and more diversified companies benefit more than other firms. Our empirical test relies on a dataset with daily firm-level stock price data for close to 4,000 US companies over the period 2009–2016. Concretely, we assess how the shares of different types of firms reacted to the news on the (lack of) progress of the negotiations aimed at concluding the TPP and TTIP. We find support for the view that medium-sized and diversified companies win the most from trade agreements. Besides speaking to the literature on the distributional effects of trade agreements, the article contributes to recent research on the role of firms in the international political economy and the stock market consequences of political events. It also presents a novel approach to measuring progress and stagnation in international trade negotiations using computational text analysis.
{"title":"Winners and Losers From Trade Agreements: Stock Market Reactions to TPP and TTIP","authors":"Andreas Dür, Lisa Lechner","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7146","url":null,"abstract":"Which companies gain and which companies lose from trade agreements? In contrast to a view that sees the largest companies as the main beneficiaries of trade agreements, we argue that medium-sized companies gain the most from them. Moreover, we examine whether more capital-intensive and more diversified companies benefit more than other firms. Our empirical test relies on a dataset with daily firm-level stock price data for close to 4,000 US companies over the period 2009–2016. Concretely, we assess how the shares of different types of firms reacted to the news on the (lack of) progress of the negotiations aimed at concluding the TPP and TTIP. We find support for the view that medium-sized and diversified companies win the most from trade agreements. Besides speaking to the literature on the distributional effects of trade agreements, the article contributes to recent research on the role of firms in the international political economy and the stock market consequences of political events. It also presents a novel approach to measuring progress and stagnation in international trade negotiations using computational text analysis.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"69 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135888335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been promoting the concept of a “geopolitical Commission” since her appointment in late 2019. Since then, successive crises—the Covid-19 pandemic, the ever-worsening climate crisis, and the war in Ukraine—have tested the Commission’s intention to turn the concept into practice. This is particularly evident in the field of energy politics following Russia’s attack on Ukraine. When the war started, Russia was the EU’s largest energy supplier. The EU’s desire to end its energy dependency on Russia called for “geopolitical actorness,” notably swift political and diplomatic initiatives to find alternative suppliers considering the rapidly changing geopolitical circumstances. To what extent and how did this occur? Did the Commission achieve its goal of becoming a geopolitical actor in the field of energy politics? What does geopolitical actorness imply for the EU’s energy policy and low-carbon transition? The article addresses these questions through an analysis of policy documents published by the von der Leyen Commission between 2019–2023, including the communications on the European Green Deal and Critical Raw Materials Resilience, the EU Hydrogen Strategy, the Global Gateway, the REPowerEU Plan, the External Energy Strategy, the Solar Energy Strategy, and the Green Deal Industrial Plan. The article argues that EU policy priorities progressively shifted from a focus on broad multilateral cooperation and open strategic autonomy to more narrowly defined strategic partnerships with “like-minded” Western and neighbouring countries. The 2022 war in Ukraine was a strong catalyst for this shift.
{"title":"Governing the EU’s Energy Crisis: The European Commission’s Geopolitical Turn and its Pitfalls","authors":"Marco Siddi, Federica Prandin","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7315","url":null,"abstract":"European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been promoting the concept of a “geopolitical Commission” since her appointment in late 2019. Since then, successive crises—the Covid-19 pandemic, the ever-worsening climate crisis, and the war in Ukraine—have tested the Commission’s intention to turn the concept into practice. This is particularly evident in the field of energy politics following Russia’s attack on Ukraine. When the war started, Russia was the EU’s largest energy supplier. The EU’s desire to end its energy dependency on Russia called for “geopolitical actorness,” notably swift political and diplomatic initiatives to find alternative suppliers considering the rapidly changing geopolitical circumstances. To what extent and how did this occur? Did the Commission achieve its goal of becoming a geopolitical actor in the field of energy politics? What does geopolitical actorness imply for the EU’s energy policy and low-carbon transition? The article addresses these questions through an analysis of policy documents published by the von der Leyen Commission between 2019–2023, including the communications on the European Green Deal and Critical Raw Materials Resilience, the EU Hydrogen Strategy, the Global Gateway, the REPowerEU Plan, the External Energy Strategy, the Solar Energy Strategy, and the Green Deal Industrial Plan. The article argues that EU policy priorities progressively shifted from a focus on broad multilateral cooperation and open strategic autonomy to more narrowly defined strategic partnerships with “like-minded” Western and neighbouring countries. The 2022 war in Ukraine was a strong catalyst for this shift.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135888843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines policy change in the EU’s financial assistance regime through a collective learning perspective. By defining a financial assistance regime as the set of rules governing the disbursement and withdrawal of funding to the member states in the context of crisis management, the article seeks to address the following research question: How can we explain the exact form of change in the EU’s financial assistance regime between the euro crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic? The article finds that financial assistance in the EU moved from “intergovernmental coordination” with the European Stability Mechanism to a form of “limited supranational delegation” with the Recovery and Resilience Facility and argues that such a change is due to a collective policy-learning process. This finding suggests that the EU tends to learn from past crisis experiences, freeing itself from established institutional constraints, only when the next crisis becomes a concrete cause for concern. However, when the next crisis strikes, the EU is indeed able to radically alter its practices based on previous policy failures.
本文从集体学习的角度考察了欧盟财政援助制度的政策变化。通过将财政援助制度定义为在危机管理背景下管理向成员国提供资金的支付和撤回的一套规则，本文试图解决以下研究问题:我们如何解释欧元危机和2019冠状病毒病大流行之间欧盟财政援助制度变化的确切形式?文章发现，欧盟的财政援助从与欧洲稳定机制(European Stability Mechanism)的“政府间协调”转变为与复苏和弹性基金(Recovery and Resilience Facility)的一种“有限超国家授权”形式，并认为这种变化是由于集体的政策学习过程。这一发现表明，欧盟往往会从过去的危机经验中吸取教训，只有当下一次危机成为令人担忧的具体原因时，才会将自己从既定的制度约束中解放出来。然而，当下一次危机来袭时，欧盟确实能够根据以往的政策失败从根本上改变其做法。
{"title":"Collective Policy Learning in EU Financial Assistance: Insights from the Euro Crisis and Covid‐19","authors":"Andrea Capati","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7175","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines policy change in the EU’s financial assistance regime through a collective learning perspective. By defining a financial assistance regime as the set of rules governing the disbursement and withdrawal of funding to the member states in the context of crisis management, the article seeks to address the following research question: How can we explain the exact form of change in the EU’s financial assistance regime between the euro crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic? The article finds that financial assistance in the EU moved from “intergovernmental coordination” with the European Stability Mechanism to a form of “limited supranational delegation” with the Recovery and Resilience Facility and argues that such a change is due to a collective policy-learning process. This finding suggests that the EU tends to learn from past crisis experiences, freeing itself from established institutional constraints, only when the next crisis becomes a concrete cause for concern. However, when the next crisis strikes, the EU is indeed able to radically alter its practices based on previous policy failures.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135648194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The article investigates the political determinants of fiscal governance in the EU. Since the outset of the Economic and Monetary Union, the EU adopted a model of fiscal regulation which attempted to keep government debt and deficit in check to avoid “fiscal dominance.” With the 2020 pandemic, the EU suspended the fiscal rules and adopted a program, Next Generation EU, having some features of a central fiscal capacity. On the bases of comparative federal analysis, the article discusses the political conditions that preside over the formation of a stable central fiscal capacity, here conceptualized as the “triple-T model.” We argue that, in unions of states, the determinants of a central fiscal capacity consist in the appearance of an existential threat, in the reciprocal trust among national governments for answering the threat with central resources, and an adequately long time planning horizon of national policymakers to apprehend the benefits of those common resources for all member states. On these bases, the article outlines the contour of a new EU fiscal set up which encompasses an EU central fiscal capacity and robust budget rules framing the fiscal choices of national authorities.
{"title":"The Political Determinants of Fiscal Governance in the EU: Towards a New Equilibrium","authors":"Marco Buti, Sergio Fabbrini","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7248","url":null,"abstract":"The article investigates the political determinants of fiscal governance in the EU. Since the outset of the Economic and Monetary Union, the EU adopted a model of fiscal regulation which attempted to keep government debt and deficit in check to avoid “fiscal dominance.” With the 2020 pandemic, the EU suspended the fiscal rules and adopted a program, Next Generation EU, having some features of a central fiscal capacity. On the bases of comparative federal analysis, the article discusses the political conditions that preside over the formation of a stable central fiscal capacity, here conceptualized as the “triple-T model.” We argue that, in unions of states, the determinants of a central fiscal capacity consist in the appearance of an existential threat, in the reciprocal trust among national governments for answering the threat with central resources, and an adequately long time planning horizon of national policymakers to apprehend the benefits of those common resources for all member states. On these bases, the article outlines the contour of a new EU fiscal set up which encompasses an EU central fiscal capacity and robust budget rules framing the fiscal choices of national authorities.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135648190","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The experience of dealing with the socio-economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine confirms the thesis that decisions on financial assistance must be taken without delay and that the government must have a certain degree of freedom and flexibility to act. However, do emergencies entitle governments to bypass the principles of responsible and transparent fiscal policy-making? Do the challenges countries face in dealing with the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine also legitimise governments’ furthering of the debudgetisation of public finances? This article aims to answer these questions. The background of the considerations will be an analysis of Polish legal solutions and systemic practice. First, it is worth noting that anti-crisis measures in Poland have been taken primarily through extra-budgetary financial instruments, which are not included in the monitored scope of public finance. Surprising budgetary solutions appear, such as transferring Treasury securities instead of subsidies or pushing certain expenditures outside the state budget, to circumvent regulations and legally binding restrictions. In the context of parliamentary scrutiny, this means that a significant proportion of public debt is outside parliamentary control, and the scale of circumvention of the constitutional limit on public debt has been increasing for several years, reaching a considerable percentage of the GDP in 2021. This phenomenon is also accompanied by a record increase in public debt, fuelled by borrowing to finance tasks related to countering the Covid-19 pandemic and the socio-economic consequences of the war in Ukraine. It is, therefore, worth taking a closer look at the Polish government’s budgetary solutions, which undoubtedly do not contribute to fostering transparency in budgetary policy.
{"title":"The Debudgetisation of Public Finances in Poland After Covid‐19 and the War in Ukraine","authors":"Maciej Serowaniec","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7242","url":null,"abstract":"The experience of dealing with the socio-economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine confirms the thesis that decisions on financial assistance must be taken without delay and that the government must have a certain degree of freedom and flexibility to act. However, do emergencies entitle governments to bypass the principles of responsible and transparent fiscal policy-making? Do the challenges countries face in dealing with the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine also legitimise governments’ furthering of the debudgetisation of public finances? This article aims to answer these questions. The background of the considerations will be an analysis of Polish legal solutions and systemic practice. First, it is worth noting that anti-crisis measures in Poland have been taken primarily through extra-budgetary financial instruments, which are not included in the monitored scope of public finance. Surprising budgetary solutions appear, such as transferring Treasury securities instead of subsidies or pushing certain expenditures outside the state budget, to circumvent regulations and legally binding restrictions. In the context of parliamentary scrutiny, this means that a significant proportion of public debt is outside parliamentary control, and the scale of circumvention of the constitutional limit on public debt has been increasing for several years, reaching a considerable percentage of the GDP in 2021. This phenomenon is also accompanied by a record increase in public debt, fuelled by borrowing to finance tasks related to countering the Covid-19 pandemic and the socio-economic consequences of the war in Ukraine. It is, therefore, worth taking a closer look at the Polish government’s budgetary solutions, which undoubtedly do not contribute to fostering transparency in budgetary policy.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135647661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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