Research Office

In the past 20 years, marketization reforms have forged or threatened significant changes to national healthcare provision in Europe. In this same period EU institutions have sought to advance EU law into the ambit of national healthcare. As the EU's internal market and competition law doctrines have come into contact with national healthcare policy, increasingly complex questions have arisen concerning those mechanisms that enable EU law to have meaningful effect in this area. Have European interventions encouraged marketization reforms? How does this influence manifest itself in regards to Europe's predominant NHS and social insurance healthcare models? In addressing these, the focus of this paper is directed at two national level case studies – Britain and the Netherlands – as a comparative foil for gauging the actual, or potential, role EU competition law has in influencing national healthcare provision. A particular focus is directed towards the application of the Altmark criteria and its actual or potential implications for increasingly marketized European healthcare systems.

Some recent contributions have sought to revive the field of institutional labour economics (ILE) (Osterman et al. 2009). The purpose of this paper is to direct these toward a recent exchange in the Journal of Institutional Economics (JOIE) that has been debating the relationship between original and new institutional economics (Menard and Shirley 2014, Hodgson 2014). In adopting Hodgson's "fuzzy frontiers" thesis the central contention of this proposed paper is that a renewed ILE, and its use for theorising industrial relations in particular, can make use of conjoined contributions of original and new institutional economics in one particular analytical area: law and legal institutions. Both OIE and NIE have both produced, albeit in different ways at different points, important theoretical attempts to integrate legal analysis and ideas of legal institutions into our understanding capitalism's institutions. Much of traditional ILE has focused heavily on the internal labour markets arrangements given life through firms, trade unions, collective bargaining and HRM but has little pedigree in incorporating important questions of law into its central internal labour market unit of analysis. With the clear and deepening relevance of legal institutions to the employment relationship this is clearly a problem for ILE. Most OECD countries have witnessed a decline in the scope and role of wage bargaining in their economies. Alongside this such countries have also seen, and often instigated, an associated rise in the role of legal interventions both in forging these changes in wage bargaining arrangements, in an ex ante sense, and then compensating for these ex post through the provision of individual employment rights. The emergence of legal 'opening clauses' in many European collective bargaining systems and 1

During the UK's referendum campaign on its European Union (EU) membership, the political left and right stuck resolutely to long-held positions concerning EU employment law's role in British workplaces. The trade union movement highlighted the importance of retaining access to European employment rights whilst those on the political right saw unnecessary burdens upon an employer's 'right to manage'. Both of these rhetorical positions, in different ways, have become problematic. The strength of these employment protections are not what they once were and now present a distinctly mixed bag for worker protection. Deregulation-focused conservatives on the other hand have championed the removal of such employment regulation to aid employers, despite many employers merely seeking regulatory certainty, rather than complete removal of 'red tape'. Drawing focus upon the European Acquired Rights directive, transposed into UK law by the 'TUPE' regulations, these two dominant political discourses surrounding EU employment law in pre-Brexit Britain are assessed. Some irony is found in relation to two areas. First, the European Court of Justice's (CJEU) activism in applying the directive has, post-2000, changed from a pro-employment rights approach to one much more employer prerogative orientated. This change is echoed in other areas of the ECJ's treatment of EU employment law and does undermine trade union claims as to these rules' worker protection credentials. The second concerns the nature of the 'business case' for regulation and is based on the UK's last two reforms of its TUPE regulations. This TUPE example offers a good example of employers seeking legal certainty rather than sweeping deregulation. These concerns of social partners will likely re-emerge within post-Brexit agendas to repeal TUPE and other European employment legislation. This not only jars with long-established discourses in these areas but in some cases will present some unusual cross-class alliances in the production of post-Brexit employment legislation. This is assuming Britain's adherence to this body of law does not form part of any post-Brexit London-Brussels agreement.

Norway's relationship with the EU's single market has become an increasingly prominent part of the debate surrounding Britain's potential post-Brexit relationships with the EU. Norway's membership of the EEA includes adherence to the four freedoms of the single market (goods, services, capital, labour) like any other EU member, minus exemptions for fish and agricultural goods products in the field of goods. Is argued here that a key segement part of this economic relationship, Norway's relationship with the EU's customs union, has been mis-characterised in an important way, if not outright misunderstood. Both reputable and less reputable analysts and commentators have offered some version of the claim that "Norway is not part of the (EU's) customs union".

This note is the second in a short series I've developed on a 'political economy approach' of teaching seminars in EU studies. This subject conjoins the subjects of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) and the single European market as their development happened largely in tandem, particularly in the early stages of European integration where the CJEU delivered important decisions to help push the single market envelope (Cassis, Dassonville). This seminar plan includes part traditional socratic seminar based on some core reading, and part exercise where short abstracts of key cases are given to students to debate and discuss. For political science students dealing with a court and an economic construct like a single market, this exercise presents an opportunity to learn important aspects of trade and law their degrees would not give them, but need to for this subject. It also presents opportunities to develop arguments about competing logics based on law, economics AND politics.

This is the first in series of notes developed into essays in a political economy approach to delivering seminars in European integration. This seminar plan sees an interactive 'simulation' of the Council of Minister's Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) system developed since 2015. It's strengths lie principally in providing students with an engaging format to learn about a more complicated legislative process than they will be familiar with and of a complex institutional process of the EU. It also provides an opportunity to get a hands-on view of how theory can be applied.

Context: Since the 1990s, the EU's influence over national health care policy has been limited to European internal market law or social policy coordination mechanisms. The introduction of EU competition law into health care is more recent and underdeveloped; however, its introduction would potentially be much more far-reaching and disruptive. Methods: Three EU competition law (state-aid) cases are used and are comprised of both Court of Justice and European Commission decisions. One is from Ireland, one is from the Netherlands, and the third is from Belgium. Findings: The Belgian (Iris-H) case sees EU institutions scrutinize a clearly "social" (nonmar-ket) health care model with EU competition law for the first time. This is a highly significant development. It is clear, however, that the European Commission is more reluctant to use EU competition law to scrutinize health care systems than the European courts are. Conclusions: This intent on the part of EU institutions will have to be assessed in future cases, as considerable uncertainty about its shape and outer contours remains. However, EU competition law, and the EU's state-aid investigation apparatus, encroaching into the national healthcare systems for the first time is highly significant.

Context: Since the 1990s, the EU's influence over national health care policy has been limited to European internal market law or social policy coordination mechanisms. The introduction of EU competition law into health care is more recent and underdeveloped; however, its introduction would potentially be much more far-reaching and disruptive. Methods: Three EU competition law (state-aid) cases are used and are comprised of both Court of Justice and European Commission decisions. One is from Ireland, one is from the Netherlands, and the third is from Belgium. Findings: The Belgian (Iris-H) case sees EU institutions scrutinize a clearly “social” (nonmarket) health care model with EU competition law for the first time. This is a highly significant development. It is clear, however, that the European Commission is more reluctant to use EU competition law to scrutinize health care systems than the European courts are. Conclusions: This intent on the part of EU institutions will have...

The case for the use of simulations in political science seminars to provide illustrative learning of complex political process has been well demonstrated across a variety of sub-disciplines within political science. Their value to the teaching of European Union politics has also been explored and is particularly valuable for the EU's numerous examples of complex decision-making processes. This is particularly true of the EU's Qualified Majority of Voting (QMV) system used in its Council of Ministers. This article demonstrates the use of a QMV simulation for undergraduate EU politics classes. Achievement of learning outcomes was greatly improved versus the standard Socratic seminar method and was in confirmed student feedback.