No abstract

A decade after the outbreak of the Euro crisis, enough time has passed to assess its impact on EU economic governance. This Special Issue aims to identify the institutional dynamics that have occurred since the crisis by using methodological approaches that reflect the rising complexity of decisionmaking under Economic and Monetary Union. The ambition of the contributing authors is to provide new theoretical insights and empirical findings and thereby to contribute to our understanding of the long-term ramifications of the Euro crisis for EU economic governance. This Special Issue addresses two broad research areas: power relations, institutional dynamics and decision-making practices, and the processes, efficacy and effectiveness of fiscal and economic policy coordination in the reformed setting of economic governance.

This paper depicts the relationship between the EU and pensions by demonstrating the EU's indirect pressure on pensionsspill-over from the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)reflected through economic and fiscal policy coordination mechanism. Concretely, the paper examines how compliance with the fiscal and economic policy guidelines deriving from the European Semester shape prospects for pension adequacy in the euro area countries. Pension adequacy is understood as the ratio of available income in retirement relative to available income during employment. The results point to three empirically relevant economic-fiscal policy models/configurations under which adequate pensions are observed. The models are not universally based on compliance with the policy guidelines under the Semester and they differ in terms of the type of policy which is potentially conducive for adequate pensions. Diversity of the models thus implies that compliance with the guidelines works for some euro area countries whilst for others it does not. Consequently, the shaping prospects or the safeguarding capacity of the Semester's policy guidelines in terms of adequate pensions are modest. The main method used in the paper is fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

Country-specific recommendations (CSRs) are the main policy oriented output of the European Semester economic policy coordination. This article studies the reasoning behind the Council's amendments to the Commission's initial proposals of CSRs. It uncovers internal tensions and disagreement between the two institutions that may severely obstruct the efficacy of the policy coordination process. Ultimately, this article investigates if the amendments are of any substantive relevance or merely cosmetic. Using quantitative sentiment analysis and qualitative case studies, this article concludes that the Council's amendments tend to be of substantive relevance. The main topics of disagreement between the Commission and the Council concern fiscal and social policy issues. Overall, the Council endeavours to ensure national ownership of policy recommendations by emphasising the importance of national traditions and specificities in policymaking practice.

Against the historical-conceptual background of EU social policy and evolutionary governance, this article analyses the approach with which the EU propagates social investment policies. Social investment, understood as an active rather than passive way of social protection, has become a salient instrument for reinvigorating the EU’s social dimension, especially in the aftermath of the sovereign debt crisis. By means of a large-scale document analysis, we develop four EU social investment propagation approaches (reference, objective, tool, and action) according to how active (passive) and concrete (abstract) the EU’s intervention in social investment is. The results show that the EU mainly propagates social investment with an active approach, i.e., policy recommendations targeted at national governments. In terms of substance, the EU’s treatment of social investment is based on labour activation policies backed by skills development and job search support policies, which is consistent with the main purpose of social investment.