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France and Germany: Transforming Challenges into Leadership Opportunities
France and Germany are Europe’s largest economies. Their collaboration has historically been a catalyst for change, often establishing benchmarks for economic and political integration. Today, in...
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EU-China relations – a health report after Xi’s visit and new EV tariffs
The political relations between the EU and China are deteriorating. They may not be on such a clear path towards fraction and decoupling as the US-China relation, but the writing is on the wall....
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EU Freight Cabotage: Will France Manage to Kick Eastern Europe out of the EU’s Single Market?
Current EU law severely restricts the transport of goods within a Member State by a truck operator from a foreign EU country. What is known as ‘cabotage regulations’ mandates foreign truck...
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Why Italy Fails and Swedish Economists are Smug
Our friends at Bruegel posted a nice piece called "Why does Italy not grow?" which I missed when it was first published (until a chronically sleep-deprived friend posted it on her Facebook). The...
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Railways Derailing EU-Japan Talks?
Since the mid-2000s, the EU has made the opening of public procurement markets one of its key priorities in the WTO and in the bilateral agreements it negotiates with the US and Japan. In this...
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Threats to the European Way of Life (part 4)
I wrote here about the French peculiar ban against online booking of taxis. Well, yesterday our friends at the FT report that the law has been revoked by the State Council of France. We claim...
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More Threats to European Way of Life (part 3): Movies on Smartphones.
No rest for the wicked – after declaring war on books and taxis, it took the Hollande government less than a week to come back with a new tax on something digital. This time, the crosshair is on...
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Taxis and Taxes: More “Threats” to the European Way of Life? (part II)
A couple of days before Brussels shut down for winter holidays, I was reached by an email that my op-ed on internet taxation in France and Italy is one of the most popular articles on European...
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Spycraft or Economic Statecraft? The EU Won’t Scuttle Trade Talks with the U.S. over Espionage Allegations
(A shorter version was published on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal on July 5th, 2013) Kissinger famously asked, “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” – well, if the...