The European Union budget is subject to a strict annual balanced budget rule. Given different types of expenditure within the budget, this rule has most effect on – and is most threatened by – spending on the Common Agricultural Policy. This article examines the merits of applying a balanced budget rule to the EU budget and explores the links between the budget and the CAP. The rule has forced the EU to improve its financial management, as the 1999 CAP reform shows. The presence of a pre-agreed spending limit on the CAP forced changes to be made to the initial CAP reform agreement in order to comply with this limit, although political bargaining was critical in shaping particular changes. The general perception is that the CAP drives the European budget. Yet the budget, if not driving the CAP, imposes an increasingly tight constraint on its reform.

This paper analyzes choices concerning the increase of energy efficiency made by the Swiss energy policy elite; it is based on interviews with 240 of its members. It starts from the assumption that choices depend on characteristics of the actors involved (their membership in policy coalitions, their core beliefs etc.), the characteristics of the instruments (in particular their familiarity and the extent to which they impose constraints upon the coalitions involved) and of the policy context (policy equilibrium vs. rapid change). Depending on these characteristics, actors are expected to make choices which are to a greater or lesser degree value-rational or instrumentally rational. The results of the present analysis indicate that, rather than being exclusive alternatives, the two types of rationality often complement each other in choices among policy instruments. We hope that they provide a promising opening in the often rather sterile debate between advocates of the rational choice approach and practitioners of more classical approaches of policy analysis.

The paper analyzes the divergence of economic growth in post-communist countries along geographical lines. It examines the role of culture, manifested in the form of civil society, social capital, trust, religious and business ethics, and historical experience, in the economic growth. Multivariate regression, a path (structural equation) model, and sensitivity analysis are used to determine direct and indirect effects of culture, policy, corruption, war, initial economic conditions, and ethnicity on the economic growth in 28 post-communist countries in 1990–1998. The statistical analyses show that a cultural index, which reflects civil society strength, the proportion of Catholics and Protestants in the population and historical experience, has the strongest effect on growth, economic reform, macroeconomic stabilization policy and corruption.

The repercussions of European integration on national policymaking have increasingly drawn scholarly attention, yet, the determinants of national adaptation to the European Union are still poorly understood. This article takes issue with evolving arguments which grant crucial importance to the “goodness of fit” between European provisions and national rules and practices for explaining the degree of national adjustment to European requirements. In the case of the implementation of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the country with the greatest misfit, the United Kingdom, adapted more successfully than the country which only needed incremental adjustments, Germany. The German record was also worse than the Dutch, despite the higher adaptation pressure of the latter. The case study suggests that the number of institutional veto points that central governments has to face when imposing European provisions on their constituencies, ultimately tend to shape the pace and quality of implementation, regardless of differential degrees in the goodness of fit.