Vibert's vision: Constitutional theory in search of a constitution

Abstract

Frank Vibert's book, Europe: A Constitution for the Millennium, draws on constitutional economics to describe how aEuropean constitution should be developed to govern aEuropean political union. Vibert's theoretical constitutional framework is solid, but his analysis has two shortcomings. First, he discusses constitutional theory but never presents any specific constitutional provisions that would be based on that theory. This makes the feasibility of drawing up an acceptable constitution appear more straightforward than it actually is. Second, he assumes that Europe will eventually be politically unified in much the same manner as the United States, and does not consider alternatives. Rather than having a single European government, as Vibert suggests, a better alternative would be to have European nations united through a variety of treaties, agreements, and multinational organizations.

Entrepreneurship, Social Environment and Endogenous Growth

“…Besides assuming knowledge externalities, endogenous growth models started to propose increasing returns to scale. Knowledge externalities occur when the entrepreneurial insights of some produce entrepreneurial opportunities for others, while increasing returns occur because the more entrepreneurial activity an economy exhibits, the more new entrepreneurial opportunities it creates (Holcombe, 1998). The recognition of entrepreneurship's role in the market process filled some limits of endogenous growth theories (Holcombe, op.…”

How the court made a federation of the EU

“…In many of its aspects, the evolution of the European institutions have already been thoroughly analyzed in a public choice perspective (see for instance Buchanan, 1996;Frey, 1996;Holcombe, 1996;Mueller, 1996Mueller, , 2002Mueller, , 2005aSalmon, 2003;Schmidtchen & Cooter, 1997;Vaubel, 1996Vaubel, , 1997. More specifically, the judicial activism of the ECJ has been investigated by economists (see among others, Pitarakis & Tridimas, 2003;Tridimas & Tridimas, 2004;Voigt, 2003) and by political scientists (see for instance Alter, 1998;Garrett, Kelemen, & Schulz, 1998;Stone Sweet & Caporaso, 1998a, b).…”