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The Cotonou Agreement introduces never fundamental principles with respect to trade between the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries relative to the Lome Convention: in particular non-reciprocal preferential market access for ACP economies will only last until 1 January 2008. After that date, it will be replaced by a string of Economic Partnership Agreements (E PA) meant to progressively liberalise trade in a reciprocal way. The progressive removal of barriers to trade is expected to result in the establishment of Free Trade Agreements between the EU and ACP regional groups in accordance with the relevant WTO rules and help further existing regional integration efforts among the ACP. Most discussions or economic development in Africa focus on regional integration as an important element. From the first post-colonial meetings. African leaders emphasised regional integration as a key element of their strategies. In the most recent African plan for economic development, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), regional and sub regional approaches to development arc again a key element. The plan sees the small size of countries, low incomes, and consequently limited markets as a limit to economies of scale, thus denying attractive returns to investors and in o doing constraining the diversification of production and exports. This is the key reason for pooling resources in order to enhance regional economic integration. The decision by Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland to sign the interim EPA came in the result of SACU's failure to negotiate as a bloc with a view to sign the EPA. In this research, the following statistical techniques were applied: t-test, f-test, regression analysis and its forecasts model for seven Southern African Development Community Economic Partnership Agreement (SADC EPA) group trading with the European Union, is used to simulate the opportunities and benefits of EPAs for countries or the SADC region. Simulation results show that EPAs with the EU are welfare-enhancing for SADC overall. leading also to substantive increases in real GOP. For most countries further gains may arise from intra-SADC liberalization. / Thesis (M.Com.(Economics) North-West University, Mafikeng Campus, 2011

The United Nations (UN), and its respective agencies, have developed global initiatives with the overall aim of bringing attention to the importance of educating about, through and for human rights in various professional sectors. However, UN member states have varied in their commitments to develop, implement, and report on national policies and initiatives that endorse the promotion of human rights education (HRE), explicitly in the areas of primary, secondary and higher education institutes (HEIs). At present, there is limited literature concerning HRE and its diffusion throughout HEIs. This qualitative enquiry was undertaken to gain a deeper understanding of the dissemination of HRE within HEIs. Furthermore, the research sought to provide a representation of experiences and perspectives shared by human rights scholars and practitioners regarding the placement of HRE in academia. The data from this study was gathered through individual, semi-structured interviews with ten participants from seven different countries. The findings provide affirmation of the ongoing commitment that is required by not only member states, but a diversity of actors at the local, national and global levels. It is hoped that the recommendations will provide incentive for further research, including informed action plans that will advance HRE at the tertiary levels. There is still a significant amount of work that needs to be done to make HRE commonplace within universities. Consideration ought to be given to HRE and its capacity to complement academic fields that extend beyond its assumed presence in traditional disciplines. / February 2017

This thesis focuses on state aid law as a specific part of EU competition law. State aid is therefore primarily set in the context of protection of competition in the EU internal market. Furthermore, the thesis provides an interpretation of Article 107, paragraph 1 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which contains four attributes of state aid: state resources, favoring certain undertaking or the production of certain goods, distortion of competition and effect on trade between EU Member States. Analysis of the attribute "effect on trade between Member States" is made in a separate part of the work. In this section, the work seeks to explore how European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union approach and interpret this attribute. Attention is paid especially to decision-making activities of the European Commission in recent years. Decisions of the Commission, as a body authoritatively determining whether a measure constitutes state aid, as well as the compatibility of state aid with the internal market, could also indicate the direction in which the state aid law will develop in the future. The analysis of the Commission's decisions found that not even potentially affects trade between Member States a measure with purely local impact. Such measure will...

Magister Philosophiae - MPhil / In the process of describing the background to the problem, the author will in this section firstly, explain what the African Union (AU) has implemented, secondly, explain the relevant rules and regulations that need to be adhered to as World Trade Organisation (WTO) members and lastly, explain how the self-financing mechanism might be in contravention of the rules and regulations of the WTO required to be adhered to by all WTO Members.

The European Union (EU) has long strived to act collectively in the face of international challenges such as poverty, hunger and state fragility beyond its borders. While the EU member states and institutions seek coherent responses to these challenges, they also have partly competing agendas. Yet there has been increasing agreement on collective action. To understand this agreement, this thesis asks how policy professionals contribute to the advocacy of policy norms for collective action between the EU institutions and the member states. The research analyses policy processes in EU development cooperation since the early 2000s. In development cooperation the EU's effectiveness has been particularly contested because of the combination of competing ideas about the EU's role and about how to achieve effective and sustainable development. The research finds that, while formal decisions about collective action remain in the hands of member states, transnational networks of policy professionals in the EU institutions, member state bureaucracies and civil society contribute to shaping the terms of debate regarding the EU's role in effective development cooperation. These network interactions, which form around institutional decision-making centres, transcend the organisational boundaries of member state bureaucracies, EU institutions and civil society organisations. These findings fill a gap in our understanding of how EU norms governing collective external action are advocated as existing research has tended to focus on how institutional structure facilitate state coordination. By concentrating on the cases of Germany and the United Kingdom and their engagement with the EU institutions, the research revises existing, dominant views on norm advocacy in EU external action: It links the previously little related concepts of norm advocacy and discursive networks to analyse the agency and scope of policy professionals in the advocacy of EU policy norms; and it provides new empirical insights into the role of these policy professionals for collective action between the EU institutions and the member states in development cooperation.

In thesis, the way wended by European Union immigration policy is addressed under the light of historical background. Essentially, the arguments regarding immigration and free movement aroused and gained momentum in EU in 1980s. During 1990s, the justice and home affairs subjects obtained a central point among EU policies abruptly. However, despite all the efforts since then, it is still early to say that there emerges a uniform European immigration policy. In fact, it is quite hard to reach such a common policy, due to the unique structural requirements, different priorities and expectations of the Member States. It is examined in dissertation then why the Member States&rsquo / policymakers still insist on a common EU immigration policy in spite of this. The researcher asserts that some aspects of the common EU immigration policy serve as a new migration control mechanism in order to be able to take additional measures limiting third country nationals&rsquo / access to the rights of EU citizens by transferring restrictive national approaches and legislation into a supranational venue. It is also scrutinized in thesis in what ways Turkish citizens composing considerable population within Community borders and Turkey as a candidate state conducting negotiations on the membership process are affected from these efforts for a common EU immigration policy. It is examined whether this process generate any new breaking point in Turkish-EU relations or not.

Pas de résumé / Doctorat en droit / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the evolution of EU member states' power, the EU's capability to act (efficiency), and the proportionality of the voting system in the Council of Ministers from the treaties of Rome in 1958 till the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009 and beyond, using a wide range of alternative power indices. Moreover, it considers explicitly the relevance of additional legal provisions (such as the 'Luxembourg Compromise', the 'Demographic Clause', and the 'Ioannina Compromise') and the implications of novel, more recently introduced voting rules such as reverse qualified majority voting. (authors' abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series