The first challenge is the economic situation: The financial crisis is receding but huge economic problems remain. Unemployment in Europe is at record highs and goes a long way to explain voter dissatisfaction with national and European leaders. Debt levels are historically high. Economic growth has turned positive again but remains far too feeble to alleviate the high joblessness or meaningfully reduce public debt, in particular in countries with high debt levels.

When considering sanctions, we need to distinguish between their effectiveness and impact. Figures about economic negatives such as reduced trade, foreign investment, credit flows, technology transfer, GDP growth, incomes, and so on these measure impact. They do not, however, tell us how likely the sanctions are to cause Russia to change its behavior that is, how effective they will be.

Ukraine is a country long divided by ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural, economic, and political differences, particularly its western and eastern regions, but not only. When the current crisis began in 2013, Ukraine had one state, but it was not a single people or a united nation.

General Terms of Peace Negotiations

Europe should support advanced technologies and innovation to remain globally attractive. There are several measures that need to be taken to compete more successfully with some of the global destinations. Some of the world’s most innovative and entrepreneurial cities have certain ‘hard’ features in common:

Decisive measures need to be adopted to raise Europe’s competitiveness and, therefore, support higher levels of productivity, employment and prosperity. Europe continues to record modest growth and, in some cases, record-high unemployment rates with no sign of a quick fix. Against this backdrop, Europe needs to bring the competitiveness agenda back to the centre of economic policy by addressing the factors that determine its economies’ level of productivity.

Economic and Trade Relations between the EU and Australia are based on the EU-Australia Partnership Framework of October 2008.

The Partnership Framework sets forth the following goals:

At the occasion of each EU-Brazil Summit (the last one took place in February 2014 in Brussels), business communities of both sides organize a Business Summit to assess bilateral economic relations, identify common interests and elaborate joint recommendations. The Business agenda is then summarized in a bilaterally agreed joint statement presented to the Authorities at the end of the meeting.

EU-Brazil Joint Action Plan (JAP) Agenda

From a business perspective, the current JAP agenda presents four main problems:

In Berlin, talk of the political situation in France ranges from real concern about Germany’s most important European partner to contempt at what is seen as a French ‘incapacity’ to reform. France’s failure to emulate the famous ‘German model’ is an all too frequent part of political conversations.

In the short run, one can see a fracture within the French Socialist Party (PS) in two camps : the archeo-socialists (demand policy) and socio-democrats (supply policy).The French Government will have difficulties in getting a majority since the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Left Front (Front de Gauche), a good part of the Greens and the ‘rogue deputies’(frondeurs) are going to fight against the government and might vote against some of the upcoming economic measures, notably the budget scheduled to be voted on in the fall.

Broadly speaking coalitions include both formal alliances of ‘lobbying together’ as well as informal alliances whereby groups mobilize over the pursuit of some shared goal in the policymaking process. The mobilization of more groups amplifies the resources directed toward a common goal. Coalitions provide a low-cost way for groups to expand their lobbying efforts by sharing advocacy resources, both financial resources directed towards lobbying as well as non-tangible resources such as intelligence and expertise.