Eleven Eurozone countries recently decided to press ahead with the introduction of a system of taxing financial transactions (sometimes called a “Tobin Tax” after James Tobin, the Nobel-prize winning U.S. economist who first launched the idea).In this Policy brief, ETUI senior researcher Andreas... Find out more

Latvia is used by the ‘austerians’ as a case showing that hard and painful austerity can get an economy out of recession. This policy brief argues the opposite and shows that what actually happened in Latvia is that policymakers decided not to continue but to break with the policy of austerity. This... Find out more

Just a few weeks before the launch of a new Action Plan on Company Law and Corporate Governance by Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier, this Policy brief seeks to review the stakeholder model of corporate governance that prevails in Europe by looking at the evolution of board-level employee... Find out more

In the run-up to the Rio+20 Conference (20-22 June 2012) the state of play as regards sustainable development (SD) has little to show in terms of progress since the ‘Earth Summit’ held, also in Rio de Janeiro, twenty years ago. Nadine Gouzée stresses that the compartmentalization of efforts at all... Find out more

In this Policy Brief Thorsten Schulten – researcher at the WSI in the Hans-Böckler Foundation and widely acknowledged as one of Europe’s foremost expert on the subject – analyses recent trends in minimum wages across Europe in the light of the economic crisis. In most European countries, workers... Find out more

This Policy Brief presents The Proposal for the Council Regulation submitted by the Commission in March 2012 (also known as the Monti II proposal) and conducts a critical assessment of whether it can contribute to reconciling economic freedoms and social rights. Although it provides an opportunity... Find out more

In this Policy Brief the authors put in question the possibility, generally accepted without justification or context, of pursuing growth while respecting ‘vital’ constraints of the environment. Instead, they argue, there are credible alternative ‘post-growth’ strategies, aimed at ‘sustainable... Find out more

This Policy Brief summarises the main findings of a European project set up by the association ASTREES and the research centre ERDS-CERCRID to assess the impact of the global crisis ravaging Europe since 2008 on recent developments in social legislation in Europe. The study shows that the initial... Find out more

This first ETUI Policy Brief of 2012 deals with the first ISO international social standard ‘ISO 26000 – Guidance for Social Responsibility’ (GSR). The author argues, that unlike other standards, it is political rather than technical, taking on the role of organisations within society even though it... Find out more