This paper takes a critical look at the struggle between the European Commission and European consumer markets over the future of agricultural biotechnology. While the Commission is keen to normalize the commercialization of biotech foods and crops, European consumers refuse to eat/buy products containing genetically modified organisms (GMO) and have effectively closed the market to GMO. Is this a rare example of European citizens prevailing over the elitist technical decision making procedures in Brussels and the pro-GMO coalition of agro-chemical companies, biotech research institutes, big farming, and selected member states? We show that peculiar circumstances enabled consumer-protection and environmental NGOs to mobilize consumers and to deflect the Commission’s goal of introducing biotech foods for a time, a rare achievement in the annals of EU policymaking. However, shifts in global agricultural markets will render this more difficult in the future, in part by awakening dormant tensions within the European anti-biotech movement.

Cutbacks in thirteen Swedish transfer programmes are analysed to evaluate the argument that explaining welfare retrenchment is a different enterprise from explaining welfare expansion. The conclusion is that the ‘New politics of welfare’ is of major importance in the Swedish context, not only in the Anglo-Saxon context that Paul Pierson studied. Programmes relatively susceptible to non-transparent reforms have suffered larger cutbacks than other programs. Non-indexed programmes present opportunities for cutbacks by non-decision and are particularly vulnerable to obfuscation. Hence we have a politics of blame-avoidance rather than one of credit-claiming. Pensions are among the least targeted for cuts because pensioners’ organisations that emerged as the welfare state matured have gained influence at the cost of unions.

Intelligence sharing among countries with different technical capabilities and local knowledge is particularly valuable for countering terrorism, transnational organized crime, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. States participating in intelligence-sharing arrangements must balance the benefits of more and better intelligence against the possibility that their partners will withhold or distort the information they share or will pass along to others the information they receive. Participants can balance these benefits and risks by introducing elements of hierarchy into their sharing agreements. Hierarchical arrangements allow a state to monitor more effectively for defection and to reassure others of its own commitments to the terms of their sharing arrangement. I evaluate this argument by analyzing intelligence sharing between the United States and Britain and West Germany during the early cold war, and conclude with some insights the approach sheds on contemporary sharing arrangements and problems.

This paper investigates how different factors, such as size, duration and composition of fiscal changes, can alter the effects of fiscal policy on private consumption. Using an unbalanced panel of 19 OECD countries during the period 1960–2000, it is found that transfer changes are believed to be permanent during fiscal contractions. Hence, it is more likely that an expansionary fiscal contraction will occur if the government cuts transfers. This result highlights the importance of taking into account specific circumstances, such as the debt and deficit position, when studying expansionary fiscal contractions. The results also indicate that expansionary fiscal contractions are likely to come at a considerable social cost.

This paper provides empirical evidence of the relation between trade openness, capital openness and government expenditures in a cross-sectional time-series context. It is shown that capital openness is significantly and negatively related to government expenditures in line with the conventional wisdom that capital mobility may undermine the ability of governments to maintain larger public sectors. More importantly, the compensation hypothesis originally proposed by Rodrik (1998) and traceable back to Cameron (1978) is not in general supported by the data.