• Essay by Katinka Barysch, 06 January 2006

    The EU's enlargement to the East has been an economic success. Trade between the old and the new members is thriving. Foreign investment by West European companies has helped to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in Central and Eastern Europe, and it has generated multi-billion euro profits for the investing companies.

  • Bulletin article by Digby Jones , 03 June 2005

    In the last edition of the CER Bulletin, John Monks, secretary-general of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), wrote an interesting and engaging - but in my view incorrect - article on the Commission's draft directive for opening up EU services markets.

  • Opinion piece by Alasdair Murray
    Progress online, 01 June 2005

    At the Lisbon summit in 2000, EU leaders signed up to an ambitious economic reform programme: the Lisbon agenda, designed to close the economic gap with the US.

  • Bulletin article by John Monks , 01 April 2005

    It may be too early to read the last rites for the EU's proposed services directive. But even the strongest supporters of the directive, which seeks to liberalise services ranging from estate agents to employment firms, must now see that the prospects for its introduction are bleak.

  • Report by Alasdair Murray, Aurore Wanlin, 01 March 2005

    The EU is half-way through its ten year programme of economic reform, the 'Lisbon agenda'. The EU is unlikely to achieve its goal of becoming the world's most competitive and dynamic economy by 2010.

  • Bulletin article by Richard Lambert, 01 April 2004

    European universities are in urgent need of reform. They have a crucial role to play in helping the EU to achieve its goal of becoming the 'most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world'.

  • Working paper by Aladair Murray, 05 March 2004

    With cynicism, even derision – this is how many Europeans look at the EU's key economic target, namely to become the "most competitive and dynamic, knowledge-based economy in the world" by 2010.

  • Bulletin article by Katinka Barysch, 01 January 2004

    With more than 14 million people out of work, unemployment is the EU's greatest economic problem. However, while EU policy-makers ponder Germany's 4.3 million unemployed, Britain's low labour productivity and Italy's greying workforce, they have missed one of Europe's key labour market challenges: eastward enlargement.