The case for a liberal precautionary principle

The EU’s travails over vaccine supply have revitalised calls in some free-market circles for the scrapping of the precautionary principle (PP).  This is the …

The EU’s unwarranted attack on big tech

Amidst a global populist attack on “Big Tech”, the European Union has not just failed to resist, but has embraced unwarranted attacks on some …

Enough of the “coronfirmation bias”

Last spring, my colleague Chris Snowdon compiled an amusing Twitter thread highlighting examples of commentators and activists who were using the pandemic as a new excuse …

Index of Liberalisation 2020

The Index of Liberalisation unveils which countries rank best in economic liberalisation and provides insight on countries with the infrastructure to rebound quicker following …

Spain’s Minimum Vital Income – a deceiving UBI

The COVID-19 crisis has not only led to a health disaster, but has also profoundly affected our economies and lifestyles. The European economy has …

Minimum Wage Wars in Europe

At the end of October, the European Commission proposed a Directive to introduce adequate minimum wages across the EU. Although the end objective is …

Economic Openness and National Security Can Go Hand in Hand

The Trump administration has engaged in an all-out war against Chinese technology and its exports to the US, with the President recently signing off …

Is GAIA-X doomed to fail?

As we are nearing the end of the German presidency of the Council of the EU, it is time to assess the term’s projects …

A response to the SCHEER preliminary opinion

In September 2020, the EU’s Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks (SCHEER) published a preliminary opinion (SCHEER 2020) on electronic cigarettes which …

Rule of law in Poland

The presidential elections in Poland in 2020, which were won by the incumbent Andrzej Duda, the candidate of the ruling Law and Justice party, …

Challenges related to fair minimum wages

This position paper is a response to the European Commission’s second phase consultation with social partners. The EC’s initiative has a general objective of …

Rent controls: the revenge of Econ 101

One of the frustrating things about being an economist is that people listen to you when they shouldn’t, and refuse to listen to you …

The future of Artificial Intelligence

In February the Commission published the White Paper On Artificial Intelligence – A European approach to excellence and trust. It includes some interesting proposals …

Is the European Commission to blame for the absence of European champions?

Following the veto of the Alstom-Siemens merger, the European Commission has been criticised for preventing the creation of “European champions” of comparable size to …

The pursuit of a more popular EU may be a risky and hazardous business

Britain has left the EU. Politicians in Brussels and Member States are seeking a mission for The Union that has broad public appeal in …

What policy questions will be created by driverless cars?

The 2020s will see the introduction of one of the most profoundly transformative technologies for decades: the driverless car. In the world we have …

To Ban or Not to Ban

A ban on opening a new supermarket is evidence that people want a new supermarket, for if they did not there would be no …

Rent controls: How they damage the housing market, the economy and society

Rent controls are now being discussed in cities like Berlin, London, and New York. Sweden has had rent controls since 1942. There are at …

Employment Flexibility Index 2020

For the third year in a row, the Lithuanian Free Market Institute and its partner organisations present the Employment Flexibility Index, that ranks a …

Norwegian sugar tax sends sweet-lovers over border to Sweden

It seems unfair to call it a sweet shop. In the shopping centre north of Charlottenberg in south-western Sweden, barely four miles from Norway …

The Spanish nanny state takes a step back

As stated in the latest edition of EPICENTER’s Nanny State Index, Spain is one of the freer countries in the EU, coming 6th out …

On regulation and centralisation, the UK’s record is no better than the EU’s

Those who voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU rightly complained about the centralised political structures in Brussels. …

The EP “Platform-to-business relations” amendments will not make digital markets fairer

On the 26th April 2018, the European Commission adopted a proposal for regulating the relationships between online platforms and their business consumers. The initiative …

Banning single-use plastics is a typical example of good intentions triumphing over sound judgement

The author is the former European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services.
With the Commission and Parliament both starting their last legislative year, one …

Regulating the New Media Economy

The new media economy operates differently from other industries when it comes to regulation. The marginal costs of technological giants mean that their interactions …

Fixed-term Employment for Long-term Competitiveness

Labour market flexibility may be characterized by the market participants’ abilities to deviate from standard labour regulations and typical forms of employment. Such possibilities …

State-Enforced Universal Chargers

Picture yourself at a friend’s house. Your Samsung phone buzzes, alerting you to low battery, but you’ve left your charger at home. You ask …

Flexicurity in the XXI. century

 
As the world is undergoing a third industrial revolution with the field of computer science rapidly expanding, one aspect of the labour …

A UK-EU financial deal is approaching

One year after the triggering of Article 50 an acceptable deal on financial services between the UK and the EU now looks likely. In …

A Universal Basic Income (UBI): a price worth paying to cut regulations?

Suppose the government redistributed to every adult Briton a basic, unconditional income of £10,000 from tax revenues. Would aggregate employment levels a) rise, b) …

Socially Useless? The Crucial Contribution of Finance to Economic Life

Financial firms serve many useful functions which individuals and households could scarcely undertake on their own. These functions include maturity transformation, matching lenders and …

How to reform a broken taxi market?

High prices, long waiting times, dirty money and drivers at risk of being subjected to violence. These are some of the problems that have …

Digital Resellers: The Case for Secondary Ticket Markets

The reselling of tickets for events has a long history, dating back at least to Roman times.
Such secondary markets in tickets are no different …

Statutory regulation vs private regulation

The EU’s second Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) came into force earlier this month. According to the European Securities and Markets Authority …

2017 Index of Liberalisations: a summary

The 2017 IBL Index of Liberalisations aims to shed light on the degree of openness of the 28 Member States by examining ten different …

Health by stealth: Mandatory food reformulation

Food and soft drinks manufacturers are continually reformulating their products and bringing new products to market in response to consumer demand. In recent years, …

Artificial intelligence and the EU labour market

Widespread automation is often named as the greatest long-term threat to human employment. But Europe’s immediate job market problems are of a different sort: …

Employment in privatised utilities

On 15 June 2017, the Directorate General for Internal Policies published a report which maps the recent history of privatisation and examines the risk …

Swedish Employment Subsidies and their effects on the Displacement of Jobs

Since the refugee crisis of 2015, the Swedish government has made strong efforts to implement a particularly ineffective policy. Through so-called “public relief jobs”, …

Displacement Jobs – On the Swedish Employment Subsidies

The Swedish labor market makes use of twelve different forms of employment subsidies involving three percent of the entire active work force.
In this …

Sweden and its inconsistent alcohol laws

On 29 June, EPICENTER’s Swedish partner, Timbro, published a report examining alcohol laws in Sweden. Within the Swedish political arena, alcohol consumption has always …

The tax burden of workers in the EU: a summary

First published in 2010, the 2017 Tax Burden study by the Institut économique Molinari measures the tax and social security burdens on individual employees …

CCCTB round 2: an exercise in unification or polarisation?

Originally suggested and then subsequently shelved in 2011, the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base is a policy designed to create a unified set of …

Aviation: a Brexit no deal is (a lot) worse than a bad deal

Theresa May’s famous catchphrase ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’ does not apply to aviation where a no deal scenario following Brexit …

The EU should support tech giants, not attack them

The position of the European Union (Brussels) and some economic commentators on technology multinationals should not surprise us. However, it is totally wrong. It …

Getting the State out of Pre-School & Childcare

Decisions on childcare arrangements were largely a private matter until the 1990s. A political consensus has since arisen that government action is needed to …

Roaming without borders

Following the latest European Commission proposal on wholesale roaming surcharges across the EEA, on 5 and 6 April, MEPs will debate on and vote …

Against Anti-Dumping Duties: Don’t Fear Cheap Chinese Steel

Following the European Commission’s steel price investigations, the European Union has adopted new anti–dumping (AD) duties on Chinese steel products in January 2017. With …

Intelligent choices in the present economy: embracing robotization and Artificial Intelligence

A European Parliament resolution calling for EU-wide ethical and safety standards for robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), passed on 16 February, is evidence that …

Behavioural economics – a critique of its policy conclusions

Behavioural economics is not a challenge to neo-classical ways of thinking. It sits firmly within the neo-classical framework. It simply gives us a new …

Balancing the economy: The hand of government or the invisible hand?

The past record of industrial policy in the UK is a catalogue of waste and ineffectiveness. By the end of the 1970s it was …

What’s next for Europe’s mobile network?

On December 12th, Member States’ Representatives voted to formally adopt the latest European Commission proposal to end roaming charges in the EU by June …

Hire Authority

In recent years, smartphone-enabled applications such as Uber have gone a long way to resolve the market imperfections which gave rise to taxi regulation …

The CAP and the struggle for development policy coherence

Since the 1992 MacSharry reform, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has undergone substantial changes. However, despite a noticeable move towards less market- and trade- …

The precautionary principle and the GMO paradox

 
Since the adoption of the 1990 Directive 90/220/EEC the EU has “de facto” imposed a moratorium on cultivating GM crops.
As the European …

Google Shopping: the arguments revisited

The arguments on which the various competition cases against Google are being fought involve core features of economic interaction in multi-sided digital markets. As …

A note on sharing economy platforms, in light of the Uber ruling

The sharing economy is about reducing transaction costs. As Duke University Professor Michael Munger wrote for the IEA last year, such reductions take mainly …

Innovation in Agriculture

The Common Agricultural Policy
Population growth, natural resource scarcity and climate change will challenge agriculture to deliver food security in the coming decades. Innovative …

Innovation in harm reduction

18 October, 2016
Permissionless Innovation
 
Scientific research has made important breakthroughs in harm reduction in recent years. In the field of alcohol consumption, …

Innovation in Food Labelling

18 October, 2016
 
Geographical Indications
 
According the European Commission, a Geographical Indication (GI) is “a distinctive sign used to identify a product …

Innovation in regulatory approaches

18 October, 2016
 
The sharing economy and digital platforms
 
An important part of the digital platform revolution is the sharing economy, which …

Ploughing the Wrong Furrow

The precautionary principle provides non-farming interest groups with a pseudo-official means of influencing policy. The result is a drift towards overregulation and regulatory failures …

The case for the gig economy: better organisation, easier taxation and an open labour market

Eva Forslund // 06.09.2016
 
Uber, Airbnb, and BlaBlaCar – the sharing economy is, although still controversial, well established in Europe. So much so …

Government Yet Again Tells Lithuanians Not to Work

Dominykas Šumskis // 05.07.2016
 
With Lithuanian Parliamentary elections approaching, Lithuanian MPs, like magicians, are pulling out of a hat the same old populistic …

Brexit: a natural experiment for the EU

29 June 2016
Can a country do better after leaving the EU? Indeed, we can perform an even more granular analysis and seek to …

Shadow economy is caused by bad government decisions, not “bad” people

Vytautas Žukauskas // 10.05.2016
Over the past year, the shadow economy in Lithuania has decreased from 27% to 26% of the GDP. This is …

Bans on homesharing won’t redress Berlin’s housing shortage

4 May 2016
A law banning short-term apartment rentals just came into force in Berlin. The measure, which was passed in 2014 but only …

Basel, RWA and rules of thumb in risk management

Diego Zuluaga // 28.04.2016
The Institute for International Finance has just released an interesting briefing paper on the trends in risk-weighted assets (RWA) among …

The Commission’s Android probe draws the wrong lessons from the past

Diego Zuluaga // 18.04.2016
It is expected that the EU’s competition authorities will this week issue Google with a formal charge sheet, known as …

Prospects for agricultural reform in the EU

6 April 2016
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is today the EU’s most expensive policy, taking up almost half of the annual budget. It …

Regulatory inertia is holding back the digital economy in Europe

Diego Zuluaga // 23.03.2016
It is a cliché to observe that digital technology is changing the way we work and interact with each other. …

Regulatory approaches to the sharing economy

18 February 2016
The sharing economy is based on reductions in transaction costs which enable exchanges that were previously not possible. Sharing economy firms …

EU Antitrust vs. Google

Istituto Bruno Leoni, 20 January 2016
The extent of market power enjoyed by Google is a debatable question. The antitrust literature emphasises the importance …

A statist agenda would destroy all the gains Spain has made since joining the EU

Diego Zuluaga // 11.01.2016
In many ways, Spain is the EU’s poster child. The country’s determination to be part of the European project was …

Why regulating online platforms is a bad idea

Diego Zuluaga // 21.12.2015
Today, EPICENTER releases its latest briefing, on the economics and regulation of online platforms. The prospect of regulatory intervention into …

Understanding online platforms

21 December 2015
While platforms can operate online and offline, the internet has created new opportunities to lower transaction costs by linking users. Recently, …

The UK’s competition watchdog is right to combat taxi protectionism

Diego Zuluaga // 03.12.2015
In a response released yesterday, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) slammed measures proposed by Transport for London (TfL) …

The UK's competition watchdog is right to combat taxi protectionism

Diego Zuluaga // 03.12.2015
In a response released yesterday, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) slammed measures proposed by Transport for London (TfL) …

Shadow Economies in the Baltic Sea Region 2015

The Lithuanian Free Market Institute // 25.11.2015
A new report by the Lithuanian Free Market Institute looks at perceptions and prevalence of the shadow …

The Eurozone’s deposit insurance scheme creates more problems than it solves

Diego Zuluaga // 25.11.2015
The European Commission has released its plan for an EU-wide deposit insurance scheme that will, at first, back up and …

Shadow Economies in the Baltic Sea Region 2015

Lithuanian Free Market Institute, November 2015
A new report by the Lithuanian Free Market Institute looks at perceptions and prevalence of the shadow economy …

Online platforms and the bad economics of politicians

EurActiv reports that the Italian Parliament is scheduled to vote on legislation which would regulate online platforms. The measure has been proposed by a …

Some cautionary notes on platform regulation

Diego Zuluaga // 03.11.2015
In a post last week, I welcomed Competition and Markets Authority chief Alex Chisholm’s plea for regulatory prudence on online …

Brexit: Directions for Britain Outside the EU

Ralph Buckle, Tim Hewish, John C. Hulsman, Iain Mansfield, Robert Oulds, February 2015
It is quite possible that there will be a referendum on …

Advertising in a Free Society

 
Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon, September 2014
 
In practice it is impossible to distinguish between advertising that is intended to be persuasive …