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The sustainable management of aquatic ecosystems requires better coordination between policies span-ning freshwater, coastal and marine environments. Ecosystem-based management (EBM) has been promoted as a holistic and integrative approach for the safekeeping and protection of aquatic biodiversity. The paper assesses the degree to which key European environmental policies for the aquatic environment, namely the Birds and Habitats Directives, Water Framework Directive and Marine Strategy Framework Directive, individually support EBM and can work synergistically to implement EBM. This assessment is based on a review of legal texts, EU guidance and implementation documents. The paper concludes that EBM can be made operational by implementing these key environmental directives. Opportunities for improving the integration of EU environmental policies are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Population ageing, together with the negative effects of the recent economic and financial crisis that some European countries are still facing, have threatened the sustainability of public pension systems. In this context, voluntary private pensions have emerged as the most feasible alternative to supplement the minimum provided by Social Security Systems; however, this financial product does not enjoy its expected popularity. A potential explanation of this reality might be due to the fact that European countries are far from being homogeneous, nor their pensions systems. Therefore, any policy geared toward improving financial retirement planning should take into account these potential differences. As a first approach to their analysis, this paper proposes the existence of four different ‘social models’ in Europe -namely, Continental, Mediterranean, Nordic and Transitional-. Overall, empirical evidence confirmed the significant influence of country’ ‘social model’ on the decision to invest in retirement accounts on a sample of 31,468 individuals in 2013. It was also proved that this decision is positively related to age, household income and wealth, higher levels of formal education, job situation, good health status, and long-term planning horizons; and negatively related to age squared, household size or financial risk aversion. In short, future policies and reforms regarding private pensions should not only take into account the existence of individual differences among Europeans, but also the existence of differences depending on institutional and cultural country factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare-state regimes achieve different outcomes in dealing with social inequalities. For example, the social democratic or Scandinavian welfare-state regime is often considered as the most egalitarian with a high social transfer rate and a comparably low level of income inequality. While most research on welfare-state regimes focuses on objective indicators of quality of life and inequalities, we are interested in how citizens actually evaluate their lives, using subjective well-being (SWB) as an indicator. The paper deals with two research questions: (1) How does the welfare-state regime affect subjective well-being, and (2) does the welfare-state regime influence the effect of status on SWB? Status is an essential first-order goal to produce subjective well-being according to the social production theory of Lindenberg and colleagues (Ormel et al. 1999), but is also linked to many other instrumental goals such as comfort and stimulation. The study carries out a multilevel analysis using pooled European Social Survey data from the years 2002-2012, covering more than 30 European countries. While we first look at how status drives SWB levels in different welfare-state regimes as classified by Esping-Andersen 1990, 1999), our focus is mainly on cross-level interactions between welfare-state regime type and the relationship between status and SWB. Our results provide evidence that social-democratic welfare-state regimes not only provide for living standards that are associated with the highest SWB levels, but also compensate best for status differences in SWB compared to other welfare-state regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In several respects, the EU represents both a novel system of quasi-supranational governance and a novel form of political community or polity. But it is also a fragile construction for it remains a community still in the making with an ambiguous sense of identity and within which powerful forces are at work. This paper has three main aims: first, to stress the shifting nature of Europe's geographical frontiers and assess whether cultural frontiers have remained more stable throughout time. In particular, it examines the main criteria, which have traditionally been employed when having to decide who should be included and excluded from Europe. A different question concerns the requirements for EU membership and the monopoly of the adjective 'European' by the EU, which somehow has become to be identified with Europe. Second, to explore the prospects for the emergence of a European identity. Here, I argue that European identity stands as a 'non-emotional identity' in sharp contrast with traditional forms of national identity associated with intense nationalist feelings. Third, through the analysis of the most recent Eurobarometer (annual survey of EU's public opinion) to examine the views of Europeans regarding the EU at a time of a major global economic crisis. To conclude, the paper explores the main challenges to be faced by a still incipient European identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the LEADER+ programme and on the work carried out supporting rural communities in EU countries under the LEADER+ programme. This is a programme that supports development in particularly vulnerable rural regions of the European countries that are members of the EU. It supports creative and innovative projects that can contribute to long-term and sustainable development in these regions. In this paper, we will focus on three specific areas: networking, facilitation of groups, and information and communication technologies. Some case studies are shortly described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper documents the failure of the EU's current merger control architecture to address the misallocation problem and proposes changes to the architecture which would virtually eliminate this major concern. This will streamline the working of the architecture by removing the need for correctives to either prevent misallocation or reassign cases that have been misallocated. Moreover, and just as importantly, the resolution of this problem will improve the application of the principle of subsidiarity in merger cases and bring to an end the multiple notification issue, thereby strengthening the operation of the one-stop shop approach. The changes to the architecture and how they interact to virtually end the misallocation problem and thereby bring about the aforementioned benefits are revealed. More specifically, it demonstrates how the use of the three or more Member state notification rule and the distinct market test, the retention of the existing two Community Dimension tests and the two-thirds rule, as well as the shared competence of the Competition Directorate and Member state regulators to apply EU merger law, albeit intentionally in different situations, reinforce each other to resolve the stated problem. Moreover, this limited sharing of the right to apply EU merger law-currently the EU Commission has the exclusive right-allied with other forms of envisaged cooperation between the regulators is not just simply a reinterpretation of the Commission's most appropriate authority goal but also the possible beginnings of a more cooperative architecture, relative to the current architecture of separate jurisdictional zones, aimed at improving the efficacy and efficiency of merger control within the Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study the evolution of the informational efficiency in its weak form for seventeen European sovereign bonds time series. We aim to assess the impact of two specific economic situations in the hypothetical random behavior of these time series: the establishment of a common currency and a wide and deep financial crisis. In order to evaluate the informational efficiency we use permutation quantifiers derived from information theory. Specifically, time series are ranked according to two metrics that measure the intrinsic structure of their correlations: permutation entropyand permutation statistical complexity. These measures provide the rectangular coordinates of the complexity-entropy causality plane; the planar location of the time series in this representation space reveals the degree of informational efficiency. According to our results, the currency union contributed to homogenize the stochastic characteristics of the time series and produced synchronization in the random behavior of them. Additionally, the 2008 financial crisis uncovered differences within the apparently homogeneous European sovereign markets and revealed country-specific characteristics that were partially hidden during the monetary union heyday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the European Commission's 'Europe 2020' strategy, the early school leaving (ESL) rate in European Union (EU) Member States must be reduced to a maximum of 10 per cent by 2020. This paper proposes a nonlinear distribution method based on dynamic targets for reducing the percentage of early school leavers. The aim of this method is to provide policymakers with alternatives in terms of transferring the EU-wide headline target to individual national targets. Weighting was based on four indicators: ESL rate, unemployment rate, expenditure on education as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP), and expenditure on schools per student. As a result, nine possible scenarios for ESL reduction have been constructed for each of the EU Member States in three groups: the whole EU up to June 2013 (EU27), EU Member States which joined before 30 April 2004 (EU15) and EU Member States which joined after 30 April 2004 (EU12). This method allows the European policy to be translated into specific national targets that would converge in the aggregate goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use data from the first two rounds of the European Social Survey to analyze the extent to which differences in average attitudes towards immigration across the EU-15 countries may be explained by differences in socioeconomic characteristics and individually perceived consequences of immigration, using an extension of a decomposition technique developed by Fairlie (). We find that despite the significant effects of socioeconomic characteristics on attitudes, differences in the distributions of these characteristics can only explain a modest share of the cross-country variation in average attitudes. A larger part can be explained by differences in perceived consequences of immigration, but the main part is still left unexplained. Apart from providing useful input for policy makers working in the area of immigration policy, this raises a number of questions for further research for which the ESS data can be successfully applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU)’s Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires that all Member States participate in intercalibration exercises in order to ensure that ecological status concepts and assessment levels are consistent across the EU. This paper describes one such exercise, performed by the countries in the Central/Baltic Geographical Intercalibration Group stretching from Ireland in the west to Estonia in the east and from the southern parts of Scandinavia to the northern regions of Spain and Italy (but excluding alpine regions, which were intercalibrated separately). In this exercise, methods used to measure ecological status of rivers using benthic diatoms were compared. Ecological status is estimated as the ratio between the observed value of a biological element and the value expected in the absence of significant human impact. Approaches to defining the ‘reference sites’, from which these ‘expected’ values were derived, varied from country to country. Minimum criteria were established as part of the exercise but there was still considerable variation between national reference values, reflecting typological differences that could not be resolved during the exercise. A simple multimetric index was developed to compare boundary values using two widely used diatom metrics. Boundary values for high/good status and good/moderate status set by each participant were converted to their equivalent values of this intercalibration metric using linear regression. Variation of ±0.05 EQR units around the median value was considered to be acceptable and the exercise provided a means for those Member States who fell significantly above or below this line to review their approaches and, if necessary, adjust their boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the importance of the policy context for monitoring with and for raptors, and, conversely, of the importance of such monitoring for policy. It then outlines two key areas of European Union (EU) environmental policy most relevant to monitoring for and with raptors, namely biodiversity policy and pollution policy. For each of the policy areas, the pertinent objectives and actions of the current EU policy are identified, and their relevance for raptor monitoring is discussed. The potential contribution of raptor monitoring to the further development of these policy areas is also addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]