Who Does What? On Cameron, Rutte and the Optimal Distribution of Competences Among the European Union and the Member States

Jan M. Smits 

Maastricht University Faculty of Law - Maastricht European Private Law Institute (M-EPLI); University of Helsinki - Center of Excellence in Foundations of European Law and Polity
December 7, 2013

Maastricht European Private Law Institute Working Paper No. 2013/16 
Abstract:      

The distribution of competences among the European Union and the member states ranks high on the political agenda. While the British government is working on a review of the balance of competences between the EU and the UK, the Dutch government recently published a so-called ‘subsidiarity exercise,’ aimed at establishing which competences belong at which level of government. This aim of this paper is to investigate how viable criteria can be found for the optimal distribution of competences among the EU and the member states (the ‘who does what’ question). It considers (the fallacies of) the existing literature and then continues to propose a framework for the optimal assignment of competences that would allow to apply a uniform set of parameters to different policy fields.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 15

Keywords: European Union, Competences, Subsidiarity, Economics of federalism, Decentralisation

Full text available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2364730