Search results for "Maastricht Treaty"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
Operating and stock market performance of state-owned enterprise privatizations: The Spanish experience
2007
Abstract We investigate the operating and stock market performance of Spanish state-owned enterprises (SOEs) privatized through public share issue offerings (SIPs) from 1990 to 2001, when the last SIP was conducted. We compare the performance of SOEs and privately-owned firms. We find significant operating improvements in Spanish SOEs after the privatization. Specifically, they show significant increases in income efficiency, real sales and employment. Spanish governments tried to minimize the foregone proceeds when selling SOE shares and underpriced them lower than private firms. We relate these results with the pressure of the Maastricht Treaty fiscal criteria, as well as lower informatio…
Crises and the EU’s Response: Increasing the Democratic Deficit?
2020
Since the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty and the end of the permissive consensus, the European Union (EU) has—with varying intensity and emphases—been criticized for its democratic deficits. Whereas previous crises often ended up in further integration and strengthening institutions with popular anchoring (notably the European Parliament), this time many commentators are in doubt as crises pile up and common solutions seem hard to find. The EU’s problem is that the technocratic, non-majoritarian bodies dominate policymaking and, on top of that, are not anchored in other sources of legitimacy than its ability to deliver desirable outcomes. In other words, the crises highlight the fact tha…
European Action Programmes for Lifelong Learning
2009
Vocational education and training has been a part of the process of creating a European community since the 1950s. The European training programmes Erasmus and Comett were launched in the 1980s. After the Maastricht Treaty, agreed in 1992, such training programmes were expanded further at the same time as emphasizing their importance to the internationalization of education. With a view to promoting and intensifying educational co-operation, in 1995 the European Commission created two new educational programmes called Socrates and Leonardo da Vinci. Both are umbrella schemes that brought together previously separate action programmes in the field of education. Leonardo da Vinci has been a E…
Reassessing British Conservative Euroscepticism as A Case of Party (Mis)Management
2015
Much has already been written about internal party divisions and European integration (Hix and Lord 1997; Conti 2007; Szczerbiak and Taggart 2008; Conti 2014), with the example of the British Conservative Party of the 1990s often used as a textbook case of a mainstream government party expressing some forms of opposition to European integration. In a wider comparative framework, the party can also be located within a Eurosceptic drift across the centre-right in the EU (Best 2012, p. 140). The case of the British Conservative Party is all the more relevant as the history of European integration shows how party families on the centre-right initially played an active part in the setting up of …
Germany Needs a National Stability Pact
2003
In many publications1, Horst Siebert has recommended that national fiscal policies within European Monetary Union be subjected to certain conditions in order to lay the foundation for a stable currency. Provisions to this effect have been laid down in Art. 104 of the EC Treaty and the European Stability and Growth Pact. The first “acid test”, however, has cast doubt on whether these provisions are sufficient to ensure sustainable solid public-sector finance in the member countries.