Who Does What? On Cameron, Rutte and the Optimal Distribution of Competences Among the European Union and the Member States
Published in: Kai Purnhagen & Peter Rott (eds.), Varieties of European Economic Law and Regulation: Liber Amicorum for Hans Micklitz, Heidelberg 2014, pp. 343-357;
Maastricht European Private Law Institute Working Paper No. 2013/16
15 Pages Posted: 8 Dec 2013 Last revised: 27 May 2015
Date Written: December 7, 2013
Abstract
The distribution of competences among the European Union and the member states ranks high on the political agenda. While the British government is working on a review of the balance of competences between the EU and the UK, the Dutch government recently published a so-called ‘subsidiarity exercise,’ aimed at establishing which competences belong at which level of government. This aim of this paper is to investigate how viable criteria can be found for the optimal distribution of competences among the EU and the member states (the ‘who does what’ question). It considers (the fallacies of) the existing literature and then continues to propose a framework for the optimal assignment of competences that would allow to apply a uniform set of parameters to different policy fields.
Keywords: European Union, Competences, Subsidiarity, Economics of federalism, Decentralisation
JEL Classification: K00
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation