Over the last 15 years, Europe has seen the liberalization of national financial markets as well as the integration of these markets and their governance through the introduction of the 'Lamfalussy process'. This article argues that we can best understand these shifts as one integrated project of market-building in Europe, guided by distributional struggles over the terms of mutual markets access. To comprehend the complex linkages between private and public actors across levels of governance, we have to look beyond macro-theories of integration and financial liberalization upholding an analytical state-market dichotomy and adopt an integrative approach to theory, instead. Using the example of securities markets, this article argues that 'competition politics' are key to understanding European financial market integration. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Official international economic statistics are generally considered accurate and meaningful gauges of cross-border flows of trade and capital. Most data users also assume that the quality of the underlying data keeps improving over time. Through an extensive review of the national accounting literature, archival research, two dozen interviews with high-level statisticians, and a series of data quality tests, we evaluate this common view for the primary source of data on trade and capital flows: the International Monetary Fund's Balance of Payments (BOP) Statistics. Our assessment paints a less rosy picture: reported figures are far less accurate than they are typically imagined to be and often do not correspond to the theoretical concepts with which users associate them. At the same time, measurement quality deteriorates over time as the transnationalization of economic production gradually undermines the validity of BOP statistics. Our findings raise serious questions about the widespread use of these numbers, with their deceptive pretense to accuracy, in scholarly research and public debate about the international political economy.

No abstract

No abstract

Contemporary analyses commonly attribute the global credit crisis to faulty regulation. What have been the roots of these deficient rules, particularly in Europe, where rapid spill-over from US markets took policy makers and observers by surprise? This article focuses on regulatory liberalism as the paradigm guiding European Union (EU) regulation. It has dominated regulatory thinking for decades, but it has been implemented throughout Europe only since the mid-1990s. This shift can be traced to political institutions that have filtered policy ideas. EU financial reforms have pushed policy from pragmatism, under which it was adapted to political contingencies, to dogmatism, which adapts it to the intellectual exigencies of rigid policy paradigms. Inadvertently, reforms had created an epistemic community in which 'professional' rule setters systematically ignored external criticisms. The institutionalised ambition to craft 'intellectually sound' policy-rather than policy that simply 'works' -generated rules that persistently ignored the financial markets' self-reflexivity and thereby aggravated the crisis.