Armin Steinbach

ISBN13: 9780198920885
Published: January 2025
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: UK
Format: Hardback

The intersection between law and economics is a dynamic field of research. Yet, European law has so far not been the subject of comprehensive, systematic economic analysis. Instead issues such as the European debt crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, and the climate emergency have largely escaped scholarly analysis through the nexus of EU law and economics.

EU Law and Economics closes this gap, providing an overview of the application of economics to the institutional, procedural, and substantive aspects of European law. Drawing on various branches of the economic sciences - including rational choice and game theory, and institutional and behavioural economics - this book goes beyond conventional methods of EU legal scholarship to expand our understanding of EU law and its effects. This book devotes attention to EU Treaties and secondary law, as well as their adjudicative interpretation, while using economic theory to explain their core legal principles such as conferral, subsidiarity, and mutual recognition.

Systematic and original, this book offers additional descriptive and normative metrics that expand our understanding of the decision-making behaviour of EU institutions and member states, while opening a new dialogue between two distinct disciplines.

Part I. Basics
1:Meandering between rational choice, realism, constructivism, and institutionalism
2:A cursory review of economic methods

Part II.
3:What states and EU institutions care about
4:The logic of barter trade: Rational choice and constitutional economics
5: Reducing transaction costs
6: Supplying public goods and addressing external effects
7:Leveraging economies of scale
8:Why cooperation fails

Part III.
9:Membership of EU Treaties
10:Centralization
11:Flexibility
12:Non-consensual EU law
13:Legislative choices
14:Enforcement

Part IV. Who Cooperates under EU Law
15:The European Council and Council of Ministers
16:The European Parliament
17:The European Court of Justice
18:The European Central Bank
19:The European Commission
20:Adjudication

Part V. What to Cooperate on in the EU
21:European Public Goods
22:Internal market: economic integration
23:Economic and Monetary Union