— For my ongoing coverage of the budget procedures in the UN system for 2018-19 (or 2018-21), please follow the link. — Finding reliable figures on the budgets and finances of the United Nations (UN) system is not easy, unless you know where to look for them. I’ll try to present some of this below and […]
For research purposes, we requested a list of all MEPs since 1979 from the European Parliament (under Regulation 1049/2001 on access to EU documents). We received the data today, 25 August 2014, from the European Parliament in two Excel sheets, one for 1979-June 2014 and one for the new period since July 2013. I’ve combined […]
After yesterday’s European Parliament decision, we are now exactly one year away from the start of European Parliament elections 2014. A good time to look into academic research on the past elections. Lacomeuropeene has already covered academic research on the media coverage of the European Parliament elections in 2009, and so has Die Presse (via […]
It’s been a long time I’ve been waiting for a decision by the EU Commission on my requests for access to EU documents – but today I finally received a letter signed by the Secretary General of the European Commission, Catherine Day (photo). This request concerned a set of five documents I need for my […]
As a follow-up to the 7th Framework Program, which is currently the main EU instrument to support research and development, the Commission has proposed Horizon 2020. On 30 November, the Commission published its concrete proposal on “the rules for the participation and dissemination in ‘Horizon 2020 – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2014-2020)’“. […]
Last week, the EU Council published “Conclusions on partnering in research and innovation“. Content-wise, this in an awfully drafted, hardly understandable and significantly watered down document. Given its bad quality and lack of substance, it will not have any impact on research and innovation in Europe. However, it contains the following sentence: “ACKNOWLEDGES that both […]
Accessing EU documents for your research projects can be work-intensive and time-consuming as I have experienced with the EU Commission as well as with the EU Council in the course of this year. One recent confirmatory application made by an (undisclosed yet apparently) Belgium-based researcher to the Council for a large number of documents is […]
On early Sunday morning, I’ll be heading via train from Berlin to the UACES conference “Exchanging Ideas on Europe 2011” in Cambridge/UK. UACES is the academic organisation that also runs this blog platform, and the conference is a space for the presentation of ongoing academic research on mainly EU-related matters. Among other things, I am […]