EUROPEAN ECONOMY
The multidisciplinary character of the research work developed by the Institute for European Studies encompasses always an economic analysis of every field of research. Additionally, the objective of the analysis carried out by the Institute in the concrete field of European economy is threefold, aiming to study the European economic governance, the exchange with trade partners, and also the sectoral economic policies.
Firstly, and concerning the European economic governance, this has been a constant theme of interest in the researching work developed by the Institute. The European economic governance goes beyond the Economic and Monetary Union coordination, encompassing an Economic and Political Union. In 2013, the Institute for European Studies delivered a document on “Proposals for the Future of Europe…, an institutional publication that provided answers to the current economic and financial crisis challenges. More recently and concerning the last important reforms, in July 2015 it was published a book on European Banking Union: the New Regime (Kluwer International). This is the first international publication about the new banking regime to be operative in January 2016. Finally, in the framework of the project MoreEU (an initiative started in 2014 with Notre Europe, Sant’Anna School and the Universities of Lisbon and Warsaw), we are working on sectorial developments, as fiscal solidarity.
The Institute for European Studies has also participated in several projects focused on the analysis of economic relations between commercial blocs, mainly the European Union and Mercosur, Europe and the United States, Europe and China, as well as between the European Union and its neighbors: EU and Russia, EU and the Mediterranean countries, EU and Morocco; and EU and Turkey. One example of this kind of projects is the research project called Towards a closer association between China and the European Union: searching for windows of opportunity. The Institute participated as head institution in this project, coordinating other four Jean Monnet Centers of Excellence (two of them from the Chinese universities of Fudan in Shanghai and Renmin in Beijing) in order to develop a joint analysis of EU/China relations and identify windows of opportunities. Another important example was the project Go-EuroMed (FP6), where very different economic aspects of the EU-Mediterranean countries relations were analyzed.
Finally, regarding the sectoral economic policies, the Institute has developed research focused on the one hand, on an internal perspective of every policy (internal market, energy, agriculture, budget, telecommunications, economic and social cohesion, environmental taxes) and on the other hand, on an external one whose aim is to test if those policies can serve as a model of governance for third countries.