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 ...

Space is a matter of strategic importance and in need of concerted action by the European space actors. Distinct approaches to public procurement must not hamper the cooperation between the European Space Agency, the European Union and their respective Member States. The study provides a toolbox for space procurement that addresses specificities of this sector. Each tool is assessed in light of policy objectives, market conditions and the legal frameworks of the European Union and the European Space Agency. A discussion on selected means of policy implementation other than procurement, so-called Extra-Procurement Instruments, complements this toolbox. The Third Way in European space procurement caters for both coherence and flexibility needs and is intended to serve policy-makers as they finally make "Europe in Space" a reality.

Although the new EU Party Financing Regulation is actually a sub-topic of the widely discussed European Constitution, officials have so far been rather quiet in this regard. The Regulation declares artificially created bodies called `party alliances' as political parties for the sole purpose of enabling subsidies from the EU budget to be paid to the European umbrella organizations of the established parties. The Regulation violates almost every principle of appropriate and legitimate public funding of political parties. Such principles have, for instance, already been drawn up by the German Constitutional Court and the Council of Europe.

Speculation is rife on the origins of the worldwide financial crisis of 2008, with a preponderance focusing on alleged shortcomings in corporate governance. This book offers a distinct yet complementary perspective: that the most useful path to follow, if we want to understand what happened and forestall its happening again, is through an analysis of contract relationships - specifically, banking contracts entered into in the financial services sector, considered under the rubric of contract law rather than company law. Because banking is the area of European contract law which is most thoroughly developed, banking contracts can be seen as paradigmatic of typical assumptions and shortcomings often examined in the more general debate on contract law. And indeed, the very thoroughness of European banking contract law makes it a promising ground on which to build effective preventive measures. In this book thirteen noted scholars, recognizing that modern contract law must take into account global markets and risks, consider banking contracts within networks and within mass transactions. Always attending to the long-term relationships that characterize financial services contracts, they focus on such cross-sector issues as the following: rule-setting and the question of who should best regulate and at which level; networks of contracts as the backbone of a market economy; the complex interplay between market regulation and traditional contract law; avoiding erroneous assumptions about the future development of prices; the passing on of the risk via securitization; rating relationships affected by conflicts of interests; remuneration problems; core duties of information and advice in an agency relationship in services; fiduciary duties of loyalty and care; types of clients and level of protection; differentiation in information available on various markets; and the question of enforcement.