The relationship between Council and Parliament within the codecision procedure involves a plethora of informal and semi-formal meetings in which many of the real decisions about legislation are taken, with little scope for public oversight. In the light of the current debate on the future of European Union, the report will address the question what this informalization of the decision-making process means for the legitimacy of the legislative process.

The purpose of the report is to give an overview of economic literature on three questions: the risk of tax competition between European countries; the welfare effects of a possible tax competition; and the possibilities of correcting any such development through tax harmonisation. The author contends that there are two points of view for those who welcome globalisation and tax competition.

In this report the authors discuss the proposal for a hierarchy of legal acts as that was the result from the work of the European Convention on the Future of Europe. One objective with the proposal was to reduce the number of legal instruments and give them names which are readily understandable to the public.

This paper describes and analyses various processes of reform currently being discussed and taking place in and around the Council and the European Council, two central institutions of the European Union. Proposed and actual changes in their structure and functioning will affect not only these institutions, but also the EU as a whole.

The aim of the report is to describe the rise in member state cooperation on asylum politics and to analyse factors that have promoted or impeded this cooperation. Moreover, the report contains a general theoretical discussion on what might explain the interest shown by the states in cooperation on asylum politics.

When the European Convention began its work, the open method of coordination (OMC) was not one of the central issues. However, open coordination cropped up in different working groups of the Convention, slowly but steadily.

The aim of this report is to identify some of those features which, since they are shared by all or some of the existing agencies, are essential in order to explain their legal nature and to highlight some problems that should be addressed in the process leading up to the adoption of a new constitutional treaty. At present, the role of decentralized agencies is premised on the Court of Justice’s idea of an institutional balance of powers, requiring an EU-institution to assume full responsibility.

In connection with the conclusions reached at the meeting of the European Council in Nice in 2000, it was stated that a clearer distribution of decision-making powers between the EU and its member states should be discussed. A catalogue of competences defines who, or which level, has the authority to make decisions on specific matters.