This book focuses on the legal aspects of virtual currencies from the perspective of financial and economic law. It establishes a typology of virtual currencies and assesses whether they can be considered as money. The author analyzes whether the EU legal frameworks on electronic money, payment services, anti-money laundering, and markets in financial instruments can be applied to virtual currencies.

This book focuses on the influence of food safety and quality requirements on international trade in food.

This volume is the result of a series of four events – three workshops and a final presentation – which the Austrian Institute for European Law and Policy organised from 4 October 2011 to 14 March 2012 in Brussels as “open dialogue” within the meaning of Article 11 (2) TEU. The contributions collected in this volume are a representative sample of the statements of participants of the workshops (mostly panelists, but including a few members o...

The use of economics in public policy, in the form of ex ante Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA), is strongly advocated by international organizations such as the OECD and the World Bank. In the US and the EU, hundreds of RIAs are produced every year to justify public intervention in the form of regulation. But reality shows that in many other countries the adoption and implementation of this tool has been patchy at best.

Consortium agreements for research projects of the European Commission are managed in Brussels. Therefore Belgian law is often applicable to these contracts. As organisations from all European Union member states and associated countries are potential contracting parties, numerous basic questions about Belgian contract law and multiparty agreements in particular arise. This book takes a look at model agreements from a Belgian contract law pers...

In late 2009, Europe was given a new “constitution” with the Lisbon Treaty. Now, two years later, one of the key innovations of this new treaty, the European Citizens’ Initiative, is about to become fully operational. For the very first time in world history, citizens across national borders will be able to determine the common political agenda by way of a transnational direct democratic procedure.

The Yearbook aims at taking up recent trends in international arbitration and leading them in scholarly debate. Volume I comprises contributions by 25 renowned scholars and practitioners from around the world who impart their knowledge and thoughts on the basis of their wide experience in the various domains of arbitration and related areas.

Each year the institutions of the European Union tender for contracts with a total value of between €18 - €20 billion. These already large figures are likely to increase in the new budget for 2013 onwards. EU tenders are subject to a special set of rules set out in the EU's Financial Regulation and a series of subsidiary rules adopted by the EU Commission. Understanding EU Commission Tenders is based on a thorough understanding of the law but ...

One of the most contested areas of action connected to enlargement of the EU has been minority rights monitoring. The new task created lack of clarity on the standards and criteria of assessment of the performance of current and perspective member states. This book explains and analyses the dominant trends on minority rights protection at EU level, their effects on member states and their future perspectives through the prism of the recent enl...