Tag: Central Europe

Several EU countries are expected to suffer drastic cuts in their number of MEPs, while a few of them, including France, UK, Italy and Spain, will benefit from a boost, according to a new proposal seen by EurActiv.

EU leaders decided last week to boost the International Monetary Fund's firepower with an additional €200 billion, but poorer East European countries are wrangling over their contributions. The EurActiv network contributed to this article.

Central and Eastern European gas markets have long suffered from isolation and fragmentation, leaving them vulnerable to both supply disruptions and to monopoly pricing power. However, new research suggests that countries collectively negotiating with gas exporters could remedy this problem, argues economist and energy researcher Edward Hunter Christie.

While some of the EU's Eastern member states are confident about achieving the bloc's 2020 education targets, others – Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania – may struggle to satisfy the European Commission's expectations. EurActiv's media network reports.

Prime ministers from Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary – the so-called Visegrad group – are meeting this morning (25 March) ahead of a two-day EU summit in Brussels to hammer out common positions on the EU's future diplomatic service and economic issues.

The green building market in Romania is growing fast and investors and developers are beginning to see the value of sustainable construction, Steven Borncamp, CEO of the Romania Green Building Council (RoGBC), told EurActiv Romania in an interview.

Smaller states among the EU newcomers need powerful allies among older members if they want to move forward, Dr. Timothy Haughton, senior lecturer on Russian and East European Studies in the University of Birmingham, told EurActiv Slovakia in an interview.

The role of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has been completely overlooked in celebrations marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, said Jean-Michel de Waele, professor of political science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), in an exclusive interview with EurActiv.

The flaws in Eastern Europe's model of growth have been exposed by the financial crisis and commodity-reliant countries like Russia must expand their industrial base to make them more resilient, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) said in an annual report on Monday (2 November).

East Europeans are disappointed by the US administration's decision to abandon plans to build a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. But Romanians are also unhappy with Washington's maintenance of a visa regime with its ally, writes Romanian MEP Corina Cretu, vice-chairwoman of the European Parliament's development committee, in an exclusive commentary for EurActiv. 

"Lobbying is still in its infancy" in the ten newest EU member states, but the practice is continually developing as civil society actors recognise the value of participation in the political process, argues Conor McGrath, an independent Dublin-based scholar, in a paper published in the Journal of Public Affairs.

The euro will have an increasingly stronger role to play in global markets because the dollar's difficulties are long-term, predicts David Cobham, an economics professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, in an interview with EurActiv Slovakia.

Recent economic successes in Central Europe have not been replicated in the political sphere, write Pawel Swieboda and Scott Salembier, in an article published in the Financial Times on the 5 October 2006.