The EU is about to adopt a comprehensive strategy for the Baltic Sea region. While intuitively attractive, the idea of the strategy nonetheless gives rise to a set of critical questions.

The current European Policy Analysis focuses on legal and institutional issues relating to the financial crisis from an EU perspective. The text contains a brief assessment of some elements of the plan agreed at the London Summit of the so called G-20 and a discussion on the possible impact of the financial crisis on the future development of the EU.

The report, which has been written by researchers at the Institute for European Environmental Policy, assesses to what extent the EU budget has contributed to achieving the EU’s climate change objectives and sets out arguments on how and why the EU budget might support the fight against climate change in the future.   The analysis shows that there has been little focus on these objectives so far and that this is also true for the current 2007-2013 Financial Perspective.

Following the food scandals of the 1990s and the White Paper on Food Safety in 2000, the Community made an impressive overhaul of its regulation of food safety. Whilst a number of legal measures focusing upon the elimination of barriers to trade remain in force until this day, the Community put into place a completely new scheme, covering all stages in the food chain and all types of foodstuffs.

In December 2006 the Institute for World Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (IWE) was commissioned by SIEPS to map the interests of the EU Member States and their positions with regard to the EU budget, in order to analyse both the prospects for reform, as well as the possible content of such a reform, during the budget review 2008/2009. The study employs a twin-track approach.

The report summarises the results from a SIEPS funded research project on the EU as an actor in the field of global development. The authors analyse three specific policy areas; trade and economic cooperation, international development cooperation and security and conflict management.

The development of institutional competencies within the EU’s external action in general, and in the framework of the Common Foreign and Security Policy and European Security and Defence Policy in particular, have brought questions concerning the division of roles between the different actors to the fore. Meanwhile, as ambition has increased so has expectations.

The report analyses the effects of free movement for workers from the new Member States to Sweden. The immigration is still small compared with total immigration to Sweden.

The European Commission has proposed a common energy policy conducted in a spirit of solidarity among Member States as an instrument to address the issue of energy security. The authors of this report, Chloé Le Coq and Elena Paltseva, highlight that such a common energy policy may entail biased economic incentives and thereby cause problems with so-called moral hazard.

The report, written by Jorge Nuñéz Ferrer, Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), analyses how the own resources system can be reformed to foster better decision-making in relation to policy-making in the EU. The author argues that a combined strategy of policy reform and changes in the own resources system is necessary and the report therefore proposes to finance the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in a different way.