A major World Bank study, published this month, lauds the European Union as an extraordinary economic success story and concludes that the current turmoil, far from being a terminal failure, should be the trigger for reforms to improve the community’s weak points. The thorough, richly documented analysis provides a strong antidote to prevailing prescriptions of the euro’s impending doom.  Such euro-pessimism has prevailed in recent years, as the Eurozone has struggled to address bouts of mismanagement and muddled leadership within its ranks. Deep flaws within the monetary union were exposed, along with the resulting structural imbalances in the system, when the global financial storm broke over the continent nearly five years age.

 

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All but two (the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic) of the twenty seven EU member states signed the new fiscal compact on 2 March. This inter-governmental agreement, aiming to prevent  a recurrence of the serious debt woes that have plagued Europe, will come into effect once it is ratified by 12 of the 17 states of the Eurozone, as most are expected to do via their respective parliaments.

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The most significant result so far in the crucial euro summit has been British Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to opt out of a proposed agreement on national budgets that would have involved some forfeit of national sovereignty. The plan is aimed at restoring future credibility to the euro and, although Britain never adopted the euro and is therefore not in the eurozone, the proposal was desigend to cover all EU member states.

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On July 15, 2011, Klaus Welle, Secretary-General of the European Parliament assessed the implications of the Lisbon Treaty on the European Parliament as well as Europe’s evolving institutional framework beyond parliamentary confines, and discussed the increasingly important role that political parties are playing in the European Union’s legislative branch.

On July 7, 2011, The Honorable András Kármán, Hungarian State Secretary for Tax and Financial Regulation at the Ministry of National Economy, who personally coordinated the negotiations between EU Member States and the European Parliament during Hungary’s Presidency of the European Council, on a number of key legislative initiatives, including the reform of the Stability and Growth Pact, offered his insight into what was accomplished and the challenges that still lay ahead in the European Union’s push for sustainable financial and economic stability.