Does the proposed amending directive on providing medicines information to the general public (sometimes thought of as advertising) actually enhance patients’ rights? Will it lead to good regulation? The document in question can be found here. I’ll grant that a lot of people have been involved in this, so there must be some consensus, [...]

Vito Tanzi’s book on the modern state “Government versus Markets” is a mine of fresh perspectives. His subtle challenging of the ability of governments to intervene in market failure is thoughtful — when is market failure simply an excuse for hyperactive civil servants to do something, rather than clear evidence of a problem? And not [...]

A paper by academics Nadine Levratto and Evelyne Serverin, “Become Independent! The Paradoxical Constraints of France’s Autoentrepreneur Regime” (available here) shows the failure of this programme to generate entrepreneurial behaviours. What went wrong, and why should other member states not copy France? Since January 2009, when the autoentrepreneur category of working was first introduced, over [...]

The World Economic Forum meeting in Vienna this week will be grappling with the challenging problem of European innovation. The evidence is suggesting that rather than leading the world, Europe is worryingly backsliding. Worse, of course, is the public rhetoric is not backed up by actual real-world action by governments, who persist in the old [...]

As has been noted by other commentators, the French government has a problem with the internet, and endeavours to stave off its impact with ill-timed, and ill-thought out regulation. Of course, as a national government, they can try to build a digital Maginot line around France; they’re always doing that and as Santayana said, having [...]