The Comparative Economics of EU ‘Subsidiarity’: Lessons from development/regional economic debates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The term ‘substantive subsidiarity’ characterizes a radical position in the major debate in the European Union (EU) on how to structure territorially‐based power in a closely interlinked economy. A similar debate took place in the period between the 1950s and the early 1990s over the need for radical reform of spatial economic and power structures in Canada and less developed countries. The difficulty in constructing supporting arguments from economics for both these positions can be better understood by looking at the whole range of economic thought on spatial structures. A characterization of this range into three models reveals how economics generally supports centralizing tendencies. The assumptions required to make a case for stronger, more local authorities in the EU, Canada or less developed economies are shown to be restrictive. The article concludes that the case for substantive subsidiarity in the EU, which calls for radical decentralization to more local levels of government, claiming efficiency and equity gains, faces a similar challenge to that faced by earlier economists writing on less developed economies. L’expression ‘subsidiarité rélle’ définit une position radicale dans le grand débat qui anime l’Union Européenne sur la manière de structurer un pouvoir sur un territoire, dans une économie interdépendante. Entre les années 1950 et le début des années 1990, des discussions similaires se sont déroulées sur la nécessité de réformer profondément les structures spatiales du pouvoir et de l’économie au Canada et dans des pays sous‐développés. Dans les deux cas, on peut plus aisément appréhender la difficulté de trouver dans l’économie une source d’arguments favorables, si on observe l’éventail des pensées économiques sur les structures spatiales; en ramenant cette palette à trois modèles caractéristiques, on peut établir que l’économie penche généralement vers la centralisation. Par ailleurs, l’article démontre la nature restrictive des hypothèses permettant de dépeindre des autorités à la fois plus fortes et plus locales dans l’UE, au Canada ou dans des économies en développement. L’article conclut que la défense d’une subsidiarité réelle au sein de l’UE – appelant à une décentralisation radicale à des niveaux plus locaux de gouvernement, tout en revendiquant des gains d’efficacité et d’équité– est confrontée à un défi similaire à celui qu’ont rencontré les économistes passés quand ils écrivaient sur les économies en développement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".