EU Law and Economics

In this insightful volume, Armin Steinbach provides an innovative, coherent, and satisfying approach to understanding the rules, processes, and constitutional structure of European integration. Drawing on law and economics, rational choice theory, public choice theory, constructivist theory, constitutional economics, and other dimensions of rational analysis, he provides an essential and compelling framework for current understanding and future research that will guide students, policymakers, and scholars of the EU for decades. This volume shows, to paraphrase Molière in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, that for 70 years the EU has been 'speaking' law and economics without knowing it.

Auteur
Armin Steinbach holds the Jean Monnet Chair of Law and Economics, European Law, and International Law. He is also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics (LSE) and non-resident Fellow at Brussels-based think tank Bruegel. He previously served as a government official for more than ten years, heading the fiscal policy division in the German Ministry of Finance and the economic policy division in the Ministry of Economic and Energy Affairs. Armin sits on the WTO list of panellists serving the WTO Dispute Settlement Body.

Résumé
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. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to download from OUP and selected open access locations.