Brussels official pressured Finnish parliament to accept EU stimulus package

Travel restrictions imposed by Finland are causing tension with Estonia, as Finland’s strict COVID-19 exit strategy has only allowed commuting by air, subjecting those travelling by ferry to quarantine and leaving some 20,000 Estonian workers who have been staying in…

The European Commission proposed to improve sustainability reporting by revising the non-financial reporting directive 2014/95/EU. The accompanying impact assessment (IA) provides a well-defined problem that is substantiated with evidence, a clear set of objectives that correspond to the problems identified and makes effort to cover SMEs in the consultation strategy. Overall, the evidence used in the IA seems recent and reliable. However, the IA has not set any concrete targets, indicators or timelines for achieving its objectives. The range of options in the IA appears rather imbalanced, the analysis has been predominantly economic and has focused on the effectiveness of meeting the specific objectives and their costs, while the discussion of benefits has remained rather descriptive. Environmental impacts seem to have been completely excluded, the costs of indirect effects on SMEs in the supply chains of large companies have not been quantified and the benefits for listed SMEs have not been elaborated on.

Source : © European Union, 2021 – EP

The Covid-19 pandemic has created huge challenges for policymakers in the whole world. These challenges have to do with both the short run and the long run. In addition, in the euro area, these challenges have dimensions that are peculiar to the fact that the euro area is a monetary union with one monetary authority and nineteen separate budgetary authorities. In this policy brief, the author provides some answer to two questions: • Which policy mix (national/supranational) supports smooth recovery, sustainability of public finances and resilience of the euro area? • Which EMU governance reforms should be prioritised so as to improve the functioning of the euro area?

Source : © European Union, 2021 – EP

Finland’s biggest commercial media company, Sanoma, has asked the EU’s competition authorities to verify whether Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE has the right to publish education and written content on its YLE Areena streaming platform. The request is not meant to…

Slovakia’s neighbours will accept the bilingual vaccination certificates Slovakia started issuing on 22 May. However, Austria will only accept certificates on vaccines registered by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and World Health Organisation (WHO). “I’m glad that we’ve had initial…