In order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), substantial additional external funding needs to be mobilized. Estimates differ, but a 'ballpark' figure is an annual increase of US$50 billion. This could be achieved by a doubling of official development assistance (ODA). Welcome steps have been made in that direction, but this takes time, and time is of the essence. For this reason alone, it is necessary to consider new sources.
Topic:
Development, Economics, International Cooperation, and United Nations
External development finance consists of those foreign sources of funds that promote or at least have the potential to promote development in the destination countries if delivered in the appropriate form. This rather broad definition qualifies all forms of external finance, and the quality and quantity of their inflows to developing countries are thus covered in the studies that form the background to this Policy Brief. These include official bilateral and multilateral, private commercial, and private noncommercial flows. A common characteristic is that all these types of flows are inadequate or becoming inadequate on the one hand and that their distribution is lopsided geographically and/or temporally, on the other.
Topic:
Development, Economics, International Cooperation, and United Nations
In recent years, the issues of international migration and asylum have risen to the top of the international agenda. The pressures and opportunities linked to the process of globalization have led to an increase in the number of people moving from one country and continent to another. At the same time, insecurity and armed conflict in many of the world's poorest and economically marginalized states have triggered new waves of displaced people.
This paper argues that the US Civil False Claims Act of 1986 (hereafter CFCA) could provide the European Community with a means to effectively protect the largely decentralised revenue collection and expenditure of the Community bud get. It also offers a solution to the difficulty of creating an effective means of investigation and penalisation of cross-border fraud without having to create a Community criminal law or a European Public Prosecutor.
The ongoing Intergovernmental Conference (IGC 2003) must re-shape Giscard d'Estaing's draft into a Constitutional Treaty that can be signed and subsequently ratified by all 25 members of the enlarged European Union.
This report carries out an assessment of the European measures and practices implemented within the scope of the Schengen borders regime after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States. In particular we look at: the re-introduction of border checks on the basis of Art. 2.2 of the Schengen Convention, along with the plan to put protestors under surveillance and deny entry to suspected troublemakers; and the policies on intrusive surveillance through the use of biometric technologies and databases , as well as the controv ersial EU/US bilateral relations on the transfer of Passenger Name Record information (PNR).
The Wider Europe has become a prominent feature in European foreign policy discourse. The EU's first policy documents on this subject, however, have been thin in substance, mainly seeking to develop more active bilateral relations with countries such as Ukraine and Moldova. At the same time, however, the EU is discussing bilaterally just with Russia a set of common European policy spaces that should be at the heart of a Wider Europe policy. This paper argues that the EU should adopt a systematic approach to defining a complete set of seven common European policy spaces, with multilateral institutional developments to match, thus bringing together the bilateral and multilateral approaches. The overarching institutional mechanism should be through transforming the present very weak 'European Conference' into a seriously structured 'Pan-European Conference', led by a Coordinating Group consisting of the EU, Russia and a few other rotating places for non-EU states, with institutionalised linkages to the Council of Europe and other European multilateral organisations for the specific common policy spaces.
Topic:
International Organization and Regional Cooperation
This Policy Brief criticis es the European Commission's proposal to mandate compliance with a local corporate governance code and to set minimum criteria for these codes. It argues that the European Commission missed an opportunity to set a European corporate governance code in the mid -1990s, and that much of the proposals are simply reactive to events and new legislation in the US. Europe should have highlighted the strength of its diversity, and emphasised that the basic elements of corporate governance are better controlled in the EU than t hey are in the US, rather than embarking on a complex harmonisation exercise.
Topic:
Government, Human Rights, and International Organization
The EU's draft Constitutional Treaty proposes the most radical reform of EU institutions ever put forward - more radical than those in the Single European Act, the Maastricht and Nice Treaties combined. Many of the changes have been debated, but little notice has been paid to what is perhaps the most critical reform: the change in the EU's decision-making procedures.
Topic:
Government, Human Rights, and International Organization
This paper is based on an analysis of the results of more than 40 public opinion surveys taken during the period from 1989 through 2002; special attention is given to surveys taken during 2000-02. The analysis concludes that approximately two-fifths of the public are seriously concerned about global warming. Another two-fifths are moderately concerned; shifts in the opinions of this moderately concerned group would likely alter the future course of government policies. The other one-fifth of the public does not consider global warming much of a problem, does not worry about it very much or not at all, and does not believe that carbon dioxide emissions are a cause of it. A substantial majority of the US public wants the government to do something about the problem of global warming, and they would like the US to participate in the Kyoto Protocol. Most respondents prefer mandatory rather than voluntary emission reductions by industry. A majority of the public supports US economic assistance to fund mitigation projects in developing countries. Gaps between the US public and US leaders are evident, with the public exhibiting more concern and more support for new policies. The level of US public concern is nearly as high as it is among European publics, where there is also opposition to current US policy.
Topic:
Government, Human Rights, and International Organization