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Publishers Abstract:
The debate on Social Europe of the last twenty years has circled around one major argument: the so-called structural social deficit of the EU treaties, also referred to as the asymmetry of economic and social integration at the EU level. In short this goes as follows: the EU market rules (competition and State aid law, the free movement rules, and deduced from them the public procurement rules) apply also to the Member States welfare systems; this leads to the so-called negative integration of these fields at the EU level, which can however not be accompanied by positive integration measures, because the Union has not been given the appropriate competences for this. The economic and euro crises of the last few years have added new aspects to this debate. Some claim that the current euro crisis is in fact a crisis of the European welfare States caused by constantly too high public social expenditures.
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