The importance of ex ante and ex post impact assessment in streamlining the regulatory environment and improving the legislative process has been stressed by scholars and testified to by international best practices. The potential benefits of regulatory impact assessment are also being rediscovered by EU officials, who lose no chance to recall that the Commission's ambitious "growth and jobs" strategy heavily depends on the pervasiveness of impact assessment in the regulatory process at EU and member state level. This study, conceived for scholars and policymakers, provides an overview of the state of the art on impact assessment. It focuses on the latest developments in the United States, UK, and EU, and presents a scorecard analysis of the Commission's extended impact assessments. The author concludes with a road map for improving the transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness of the EU Integrated Impact Assessment model.

This book presents a comprehensive debate and analysis of existing Territorial Impact Assessment (TIA) methodologies, designed under the auspices of the ESPON programme since the mid-2000s. This is intended to serve as a TIA handbook for the reader, to better understand the main differences, advantages and shortcomings of each presented TIA methodology. It also serves as a manual for professors and students in the field of policy evaluation, and territorial analysis, as it presents concrete examples of the implementation of each TIA methodology, their formulas and intrinsic evaluation elements. The purpose of policy evaluation methodologies is to check the main effects of private and public investments, in order to report back to policymakers and citizens on their efficiency and effectiveness. Over the past decades, both in Europe and worldwide, there has been an increasingly awareness of the need to implement/reinforce policy evaluation practices, at all territorial levels. At the same time, it has become widely accepted that many policy interventions produce impacts in more than one dimensions of territorial development. In this context, the use of a holistic and territorial approach for policy impact assessment evaluation has rapidly been adopted by the European Commission as a mainstream policy evaluation procedure.

Laws and regulations affect the daily lives of businesses and citizens. High-quality laws promote national welfare and growth, while badly designed laws hinder growth, harm the environment and put the health of citizens at risk. This report analyses practices to improve the quality of laws ...

A reference source on the world trade union movements, this edition covers every country, with sections on: the Political and Economic Background; Trade Unionism; Trade Union Centres; and Other Trade Union Organizations.

Recent constitutional thinking has directed its attention to the profound impact of 'soft' norms on the way legislation is made. This book identifies the European Union's impact assessment regime as a source of these norms. In 2002 the European Commission - later followed by the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers - committed to performing rigorous assessment of the economic, social and environmental impacts of policy options before adopting (legislative) proposals. Applying a 'constitutional lens' to this 'regulatory' topic, Anne Meuwese examines both the details and the framework of IA in EU lawmaking to date, drawing attention to its strengths, its contradictions, and its power to enhance the deliberative quality of legislative debates. Integrating the perspectives of political scientists and economists with the concerns of legal scholars and practitioners, Dr Meuwese describes and interrelates such aspects of the subject as the following: the potential role of impact assessment as a catalyst of legal principles, by emphasising or overriding norms that govern both the procedural and the substantive aspects of the EU legislative process; the 'constitutional tasks' of impact assessment as applied to European legislative proposals, especially relating to subsidiarity, proportionality, and the precautionary principle; the formal and informal extension of the scope of impact assessment beyond the co-decision procedure; the question whether impact assessment crosses the line between informing the legislator and fettering legislative discretion. In the course of her analysis Dr Meuwese develops models for possible usages of IA in EU lawmaking, analyses the implementation of impact assessment processes in the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council as well as the roles of relevant 'co-actors', and offers results of empirical research in the forms of a survey of EU legislative practice and in-depth case studies of four EU legislative dossiers.

Presenting the first continental-scale assessment of reactive nitrogen in the environment, this book sets the related environmental problems in context by providing a multidisciplinary introduction to the nitrogen cycle processes. Issues of upscaling from farm plot and city to national and continental scales are addressed in detail with emphasis on opportunities for better management at local to global levels. The five key societal threats posed by reactive nitrogen are assessed, providing a framework for joined-up management of the nitrogen cycle in Europe, including the first cost-benefit analysis for different reactive nitrogen forms and future scenarios. Incorporating comprehensive maps, a handy technical synopsis and a summary for policy makers, this landmark volume is an essential reference for academic researchers across a wide range of disciplines, as well as stakeholders and policy makers. It is also a valuable tool in communicating the key environmental issues and future challenges to the wider public.

There are many reasons why strategic intelligence is required to support policy decisions. These primarily stem from the nature of today's kno- edge society with two contrasting trends. On the one hand, there is a trend of increasing human intelligence in the economic, social and political s- tems. On the other hand, there is a trend towards dissolving certainties about the problems and solutions of today's society. Clearly, more inf- mation does not necessary imply more certainties on how to act. What is more, the same facts are often interpreted in markedly different ways: the same policy relevant information can – and often does – results in confli- ing framing of a problem by different stakeholders. This is mainly due to competing assumptions, rather then because of inconsistent facts. The- fore, it is not surprising that policy-makers are calling for strategic intel- gence to support their understanding of today's challenges, including the relevant aspects of science and technology, their impact and their possible future developments. Over the last 15 years, Europe has rapidly adopted the practice of dev- oping and using Impact Assessment (IA) tools to support decision-making. Formal procedures and guidance for IA are well established within the European Commission and in most EU Member States. The adoption of IA procedures alone, however, does not guarantee that every policy domain is actually using the full potential of these assessment tools in the preparation of policies and legislation.