Publications Archive

The EU Commission wants to improve cybersecurity in the EU and for this purpose strengthen the cybersecurity agency ENISA. In cep’s view, this is urgently needed. The proposal to give ENISA a permanent mandate and increasing its funding and staff is also appropriate.

By introducing new support criteria for "combined transport", the EU Commission wants to shift more freight traffic off the roads and onto railways and waterways. In cep's view, this may reduce CO₂ emissions, but there is also a risk that inefficiencies will be subsidised.

The European Commission wants to give the European Banking Authority (EBA) more responsibility for financial supervision. In cep’s view, however, the EBA’s new tasks, to allow for “ecological and social factors” and to promote consumer protection, may lead to a conflict of interest with its actual task - safeguarding financial stability.

The EU Commission wants to use a "stabilisation function" to protect Member States, and particularly eurozone countries, from the consequences of an economic shock. For this purpose, it has submitted a Communication which has been taken up by the German grand coalition. Although the stabilisation function reduces the risk of a state having to apply for financial aid, cep nevertheless takes a critical view of the idea.

Due to reasons of cost, traders refrain from offering their goods across borders and consumers shy away from purchasing in other countries due to legal uncertainty. The Commission wants to change this by way of a Directive. It wants to remove barriers in cross-border trade with extensive full-harmonisation of guarantee law for sales of goods.

In order to reduce CO₂ emissions in road transport, CO₂ limits on cars and light duty vehicles will be further tightened. The EU Commission has made a proposal for a Regulation in this regard of which cep takes a primarily critical view because stricter CO₂ limits give rise to high CO₂ avoidance costs.

As the cepDefault-Index shows, the trends in creditworthiness over the last year have varied between the eurozone countries. Thus the ability to repay debts of two-thirds of eurozone countries (including Germany) is steadily increasing whilst in others it has been falling continuously or is already lost.

The creditworthiness of Greece and Portugal continues to decline. This is the conclusion reached by cep, which has just updated its Default-Index for these two countries. In the case of Greece, the three rescue packages undertaken since 2010 have, in cep’s view, done nothing to change this. Sooner or later, Greece will therefore need a fourth rescue package.

The EU Commission wants to increase efforts to combat the spread of antimicrobial resistance. With this aim, it has submitted a European Action Plan in line with the concept of “One Health”. In cep’s view, this is a sensible European initiative because resistant pathogens spread across borders thus making it necessary to take both EU-wide and global combating measures.

By way of a Regulation, the EU-Commission wants to facilitate the free flow of non-personal data and improve competition between cloud providers and other data-processing services in the EU.