Andrea Renda

Centre for European Policy Studies | CEPS · Regulatory Affairs Programme

The final blow to the established debate on the future of work was given by the dramatic acceleration of innovation in the domain of AI, in particular with the emergence of generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Bard, Llama and others. The ability of these systems to process enormous amounts of information and convert them into an impressively accu...

We present a statistical model that can be employed to monitor the time evolution of the COVID‐19 contagion curve and the associated reproduction rate. The model is a Poisson autoregression of the daily new observed cases and dynamically adapt its estimates to explain the evolution of contagion in terms of a short‐term and long‐term dependence of c...

"In their second Policy Brief ‘Transformation post-COVID: Mobilising Innovation for People, Planet and Prosperity’, the independent ESIR expert group proposes a ‘protect-prepare-transform’ design approach that focusses on applying key learnings from the pandemic and ensuring transitions that are just and that embody the European Commission’s new so...

Towards stronger EU governance of health threats after the COVID-19 pandemic - Andrea Renda, Rosa Julieta Castro

FoodTech, intended as the use of disruptive digital technologies along the agri-food chain, features an outstanding potential to contribute to the SDGs, and in particular to help combat and eradicate hunger without a massive increase in food production. The chapter reviewed emerging applications of technologies like the Internet of Things, distribu...

Research and innovation strategies are the pillars of Europe’s 2030 strategy: achieving growth that is smart, inclusive and sustainable. Key to this process is providing a direction for change, while also enabling bottom up experimentation and exploration. Directions for innovation can be guided towards the grand challenges facing societies, whethe...

In summary, the DSM strategy appears laudable and overall very comprehensive. However, its impact will depend on whether the Commission manages to create a more suitable environment for innovation and entrepreneurship by upgrading skills, promoting more adaptive rulemaking, empowering end user choice, and avoiding rules that are hostile to innovati...

This article analyses and compares ten institutions that have a mandate to promote productivity-enhancing reforms. The selected bodies include government advisory councils, standing inquiry bodies, and ad hoc task forces. We find that well-designed pro-productivity institutions can generally improve the quality of the policy process and political d...

- Get full manuscript from http://intereconomics.eu/archive/year/2015/1/ The EU’s stagnation on many innovation indicators led to a number of efforts to spur a turnaround. One of most visible projects has been the Horizon 2020 strategy, which devotes unprecedented levels of funding to the promotion of R&D and innovation. But does this strategy add...

his commentary welcomes the creation and prominence given by President Juncker to the new post of First Vice-President in charge of Better Regulation, Inter-Institutional Relations, the Rule of Law and the Charter of Fundamental Rights as among the most interesting of several novelties contained in the proposed Commission and overdue. After all, as...

In May 2013, the European Commission received a mandate from the European Council to “to present an analysis of the composition and drivers of energy prices and costs in Member States, with a particular focus on the impact on households, SMEs and energy intensive industries, and looking more widely at the EU's competitiveness vis-à-vis its global e...

Trans-national private regulation has become a prominent form of rulemaking in several domains, from advertising to financial services, food safety and environmental regulation, with alternate fortune so far. In some cases, private regulation emerges spontaneously, independently of any legislative or policy initiative. This report takes stock of th...

A lively debate emerged on the proposed “Connected Continent” legislative package presented by the European Commission in September 2013. The package contains a proposed rule on the ‘open Internet’, which was heavily discussed in European Parliament hearings in early December. This commentary argues that while the proposed rule is in principle bal...

This paper examines the content of impact assessments (IAs) in the European Commission (EC) and the UK for the period 2005 to 2010. We coded 477 IAs for the UK and 296 for the EC, using a detailed scorecard. The findings suggest that IA is not a perfunctory activity in the European Union and the UK. The breadth of consultation and economic analysis...

As markets and regulatory tasks become increasingly global, forms of private international regulatory co-operation are emerging along with – or sometimes as a replacement for – inter-governmental co-operation. In a number of settings, traditional forms of public intervention are facing enormous, sometimes insurmountable difficulties in coping with...

Private governance is currently being evoked as a viable solution to many public policy goals, although the current track record of private regulatory schemes is mixed. Policy guidance documents around the world still require that policy-makers give priority to self- and co-regulation, with little or no additional guidance being given to policy-mak...

Published jointly with Ernst & Young, this report proposes a new approach to EU innovation that aims to improve its effectiveness and reduce administrative burdens for companies relying on EU funding channels. The analysis is backed by a survey of 680 business leaders from 15 EU member states to obtain their perspective on the EU’s innovation polic...

This Working Document examines the quality of impact assessments in the European Commission and the UK between 2005 and 2010. The findings suggest that impact assessment is not merely a perfunctory activity in the European Union and the UK. Quality has improved steadily over the years, arguably as a result of learning and regulatory oversight.The U...

The emergence of cloud computing is promising enormous benefits for small businesses, due to the dramatic reduction in IT costs caused by the service-oriented architecture. At the same time, the transition to a cloud ecosystem is more controversial for individual end users, as emerging business models can potentially affect both competition within...

In this section we explore three main obstacles to the development of an effective and coherent innovation policy in the European Union: the saga of the EU patent, the problems faced by technology and knowledge/transfer legislation, and EU standardization policy. We find that in these areas, despite a long-standing debate and several attempts to co...

In this section we look at the changing meaning of innovation and innovation policy. We show that the modes of innovation have shifted from traditional, single-firm patterns to systemic and collaborative patterns; from proprietary to modular and granular models; from supply-led innovation to co-innovation and user innovation; and from closed to sem...

In this chapter we analyse Europe’s competitive positioning in the global race towards innovation, based on the recent data produced by the European Commission and the OECD. What emerges from the data is that Europe is increasingly lagging behind the USA in a number of respects, and at the same time it is losing its lead vis-à-vis emerging economie...

This chapter concludes our analysis of European innovation policy by offering our diagnosis and prognosis. We argue that when it comes to innovation policy, quality is as important as quantity, and the EU has excelled mostly in the latter rather than the former. At the same time, EU innovation policy needs yet another redesign, this time aimed at m...

Notwithstanding the undeniable success of telecoms liberalization in terms of price reduction, new services and technologies as well as consumer satisfaction, EU telecoms policy is at least a half failure. This might seem hard to believe, but this Policy Brief shows that there is no such thing as an EU telecoms (or eComms) single market. We provide...

The European Commission has successfully managed to adopt and implement ex ante impact assessment procedures since 2003, and available data show that the IA documented are of increasingly good quality. Even though margins for improving the European Commission IA system persist, other EU institutions and almost all EU member states significantly lag...

The public policy approach to the Internet has become more and more complex as several markets – including fixed and mobile communications, media and content, IT – converge into one single Internet ecosystem. As in all ecosystems, zones and domains depend on each other, and there is no possibility of touching one layer without affecting all others....

Innovation policy is increasingly coming under the spotlight in the European Union, and has been given a prominent role in the EU 2020 strategy and in the flagship initiatives that will aim to ensure that Europe succeeds where the Lisbon strategy failed.In years to come, problems such as the fragmentation of competences at EU and member state level...

The essential facility doctrine lies at the core of telecoms regulation since its very first steps in the United States and in the European Union. Later, the doctrine spread around the world and currently stands as a key pillar of the liberalization efforts underway in several countries. However, the concept of essential facility is a very dynamic...

This paper analyses the economic and legal aspects related to practices such as tying, bundling and other potentially unfair commercial practices widely used in the financial services industry. Authors draw special attention to the European financial services market. Their law and economics approach aims at illustrating the rationales for applying...

This report is the product of a joint project initiated by the Centre for European Policy Studies and the Swedish Confederation of Enterprise. Three expert groups of academics, policy-makers, business representatives and other stakeholders were formed to analyse the major issues and challenges facing the European Union today and to put forward reco...

Governments throughout the world are requiring greater use of economic analysis as a way of informing policy decisions. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the use of impact assessment in the European Union, using US assessments as a benchmark. We find that recent EU impact assessments include more economic information than they did in...

The debate of the so-called "net neutrality" has been under the spotlight in the US for many years, whereas many believed it would not become an issue in Europe. However, over the past few months the need to revise the current regulatory framework to encourage investment in all-IP networks has led to greater attention for net neutrality and its con...

The EU better regulation agenda is being reviewed by the European Commission, with the aim of improving its effectiveness with respect to the quality of EU legislation. This paper takes stock on the results achieved so far and points at a number of issues that could be tackled in Brussels in the years to come to improve the design of the better reg...

More than three decades ago, lawyers and economists met in Chicago for “the greatest gig in the sky” in the history of law and economics: the Symposium on “Efficiency as a legal concern”, where many of the most authoritative law and economic scholars of that time discussed the merit of adopting efficiency criteria in legal adjudication, and ended u...

This study is an output of the research project: “The EU harmonization in Key Infrastructure Services (Telecommunications, Energy and Transport) and productivity growth” carried out by EDAM (Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies) in Istanbul and CEPS (Centre for European Policy Studies) in Brussels. It was made possible by the financial s...

Governments throughout the world are requiring greater use of economic analysis as a way of informing key policy decisions. The European Union now requires that an impact assessment be done for all major policy initiatives. An evaluation of the EU system could provide lessons for the U.S. and determine whether the EU is allocating resources for ana...

Purpose This paper aims to explain and demonstrate how business model frameworks can be used to understand market developments and to assess the role of policy in (multi‐sided) ICT markets. Design/methodology/approach The research approach in the paper builds on integrated business model frameworks, which cover (much) more than the financial decis...

2006, which proposed to modify the regulation of mobile communications, resulting in important reductions of roaming tariffs within the Community. The briefing examines the efficiency and concrete applicability of the measures introduced by the Regulation Proposal, which created the “Mechanism of the Domestic European Market” and the envisaged requ...

[From the Introduction]. "Thinking ahead for Europe’ is our motto. In this reader we have collected our thoughts and recent writings on what should be done in the near future to get Europe moving again. We offer these ideas to the Finnish Presidency of the EU as food for thought at the start of its six-month term. These views are based on the resea...

In the EU25, some 23 million SMEs represent 99% of all enterprises, provide 75 million jobs and make a 55% contribution towards the creation of wealth: in addition, one third of employees and over two thirds of private-sector employees in Europe work in SMEs. Given their outstanding strategic importance, the European Commission has launched several...

The recent decision issued by the European Commission against Microsoft raises legitimate concerns in many respects. Firstly, the way the Commission handled the proceeding highlighted the impasse that characterises antitrust authorities when dealing with complex cases from the high-tech world. Secondly, the Commission adopted an incorrect approach...

The recent decision issued by the European Commission against Microsoft raises legitimate concerns under many respects. First, the way the Commission handled the whole proceeding highlighted all the impasse that characterizes antitrust authorities when dealing with complex cases from the high-tech world. Secondly, the Commission's decision adopted...

In the past few years, Turkey has launched very important and ambitious reforms in the information society and media sector. Even more substantial changes are expected in 2009, after the new e-communications law has been approved at the end of 2008. Apart from the 49 expected pieces of secondary legislation foreseen to implement the new Law No 5809...

Asthma is a common life-long chronic inflammatory disorder of the airways that affects children and adults of all ages and whose prevalence is rising in a number of the most-developed countries. It is widely recognised that there is an increasing need for EU member states to consider the scope for a common integrated approach to the asthma problem....

Il ruolo chiave che può svolgere l'attuazione privatistica della normativa a tutela della concorrenza innanzi alle singole corti nazionali (c.d. private enforcement), quale complemento del public enforcement, è stato largamente riconosciuto. Considerato l'attuale basso livello di probabilità che una condotta anticompetitiva sia scoperta e che le ri...

Critical infrastructures such as energy, communications, banking, transportation, public government services, information technology etc., are more vital to industrialized economies and now than ever before. At the same time, these infrastructures are becoming increasingly dependent on each other, such that failure of one of them can often propagat...