Abstract
This chapter is posed to unravel the EU implementation puzzle what factors determine delays when implementing EU directives across Member States while focusing on the time aspect of national transposition processes, which represents a particularly salient form of non-compliance (Mastenbroek 2003; Berglund, Gange and van Waarden 2006). In the following, this chapter refers to the national transposition outcome as a game between bureaucratic and political transposition actors who must agree, within an allotted time frame, on a new national policy complying with EU law. Who ends the game and when depends on the players’ expected payoff. The expected flows of payoffs to an actor equal the difference between benefits and costs.
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Notes
- 1.
So far the Court of Justice of the EU has imposed fines on Greece, Spain, and France. In 2000, Greece became the first Member State to be adjudged with a daily fine of 20,000 EUR. It took Greece six months to comply and it ended up paying a total of 4.7 million EUR. In November 2003, Spain became the first Member State to be fined twice for the same infringement. Its penalty was modest, only 625,000 EUR per year (Nicolaides and Oberg 2006). In July 2005, France harvested the largest penalty in EU history, which was both a lump-sum of 20 million EUR and an additional biannual sum of 57.7 million EUR if it continued to ignore EU legislation relating to fishing – amounting to a daily fine of 321,000 EUR.
- 2.
In Germany, for example, the most important actors at the federal level in transport are the Minister of Transport and the Minister of Economic Affairs. The two ministries, however, hold diverging conceptions regarding sectoral regulations. Whereas the Ministry of Transport has often taken a pro-regulatory stand, the head of the transport division in the Ministry of Economic Affairs defined its role through ensuring that liberal views about transport counterbalanced those of the Ministry of Transport (Teutsch and Douillet, 2001: p. 139).
- 3.
For the missing data on Greece, I am grateful to F. Häge who provided me with the necessary figures.
- 4.
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© 2013 VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden
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Kaeding, M. (2013). Implementing Classic Directives across Member States. In: Towards an Effective European Single Market. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-19684-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-19684-8_2
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