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 ...

While there may be consensus on the broader issues of the core objectives of the health care system, expectations differ between EU countries, and European national policy-makers. This book seeks firstly to assess the impact of the enlargement process and then to analyse the challenges that lie ahead in the field of health and health policy.

This book offers a strikingly new perspective on EU enlargement. Basing his findings on substantial empirical evidence, Zielonka presents a carefully argued account of the kind of political entity the European Union is becoming, with particular reference to recent enlargement.

People have always travelled within Europe for work and leisure, although never before with the current intensity. Now, however, they are travelling for many other reasons, including the quest for key services such as health care. Whatever the reason for travelling, one question they ask is "If I fall ill, will the health care I receive be of a high standard?" This book examines, for the first time, the systems that have been put in place in all of the European Union's 27 Member States. The picture it paints is mixed. Some have well developed systems, setting standards based on the best available evidence, monitoring the care provided, and taking action where it falls short. Others need to overcome significant obstacles.

The European Union will be a much more diversified entity after the forthcoming eastward enlargement. The applicant states from Eastern Europe are much poorer than the current member states from Western Europe. Their democracy and in some cases even their statehood is newly established and presumably more fragile. Their economic, legal and administrative structures are less developed. This collection of essays will try to examine the origin, nature, scale and implications of this divergence. How much divergence is likely to be imported by the Union and will it hamper the process of European integration? This volume looks at differences and similarities in the field of macro-economics, welfare systems, democracy, institutional infrastructure, civic orientations and popular culture. The book shows that the map of convergence and divergence in the future EU will be very complex and will not correspond exactly with the old east-west divide. Moreover, the division lines are constantly changing with the enlargement process representing an important factor pushing individual states into a single regulatory frame, if not in a common political direction. However, there are other "unifying" factors at play: globalization produces different models and loyalties than Europeanization. Moreover, the European pulling effect works unevenly in different functional fields and in different countries. There are also many factors that produce greater divergence rather than convergence across the European Union; a certain degree of divergence is thus unavoidable. The book shows, in particular, that certain types of divergence can be beneficial rather than merely detrimental in the process of Europeanintegration.

This report encourages governments to “think big” about the relevance of regulatory policy and assesses the recent efforts of OECD countries to develop and deepen regulatory policy and governance.

Addresses a critical analysis of major media policies in the European Union and Council of Europe at the period of profound changes affecting both media environments and use, as well as the logic of media policy-making and reconfiguration of traditional regulatory models. The analytical problem-related approach seems to better reflect a media policy process as an interrelated part of European integration, formation of European citizenship, and exercise of communication rights within the European communicative space. The question of normative expectations is to be compared in this case with media policy rationales, mechanisms of implementation (transposing rules from EU to national levels), and outcomes.