Foreign affairs have always involved a degree of secrecy and the EU external action is no exception. Out of security concerns and to protect the confidentiality of international negotiations, EU foreign policy actors such as the Council and the European External Action Service (EEAS) manage access to information by classifying documents as ‘secret’.

For some developing countries, the compensation for fisheries agreements with the European Union constitutes 30–50 per cent of the total government budget. In this report, Johan Blomquist, Cecilia Hammarlund and Staffan Waldo (AgriFood Economics Centre) analyse the effects of the EU’s partnership agreements with countries in Western Africa, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean.

The economic gains from EU membership is in theory fairly straightforward and above all related to having access to the internal market. However, it is much more complicated to show empirically that countries gain from being members of the Union.

According to the treaty, the EU´s policies for border control, asylum and immigration should be guided by a principle of solidarity and responsibility distribution. The EU has also decided that member states has a shared responsibility for asylum seekers, i.

The relation between the EU and Belarus through the Eastern Partnership framework is complex. The country's domestic authoritarian character as well as its foreign policy balancing act between the EU and the Eurasian Economic Union hinders the implementation of major reform packages.

Finding ways to boost Europe’s economic growth in today’s post-crisis world is more important than ever. In this European Policy Analysis, the authors investigate which factors drive productivity across Europe’s regions.

The presence of effective tools for cooperation and mutual assistance between national authorities is essential to bring effectiveness to the internal market. The Internal Market Information System (IMI) is one such tool used to remove obstacles to the internal market by offering a technical information system which helps linking together national authorities in various political fields.

Sweden is sometimes viewed as having been less successful than Denmark and Finland in EU agricultural negotiations. At the same time, studies have shown that Sweden is generally perceived as an attractive negotiation partner within the EU.

The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) entered into force on 1 January 2015, as an organisation for regional economic integration between Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia. Later that same year Armenia and Kyrgyzstan also joined.

The number of refugees that have reached the borders of the EU during 2015 and 2016 have put the international asylum system to the test. How individual member states respond to the calls to help people on the run, expose differences in how these states interpret international refugee laws.