Think Tank

When it comes to road safety, the EU is the world leader by far. Over the past 20 years, the number of people killed on roads has decreased by 60 %, from around 51 400 in 2001 to around 20 600 in 2022. However, since 2014, this decrease has stagnated, with hardly any drop in the number of road fatalities in the years between then and 2020. Moreover, improvements in road safety have not been significant enough to meet the EU's 2010 and 2020 objectives for reducing road death numbers. Much more will ...

The ongoing energy crisis and its related challenges of energy security concerns and high energy prices have put the spotlight on the EU's domestic production and use of energy in general and renewables in particular. The 2018 Renewable Energy Directive (RED) requires the EU to achieve a 32 % share of renewable energy sources (RES) in gross final energy consumption by 2030. The Commission has since proposed a revision of the renewables target to 40 % as part of the 'fit for 55' package, in the context ...

This study provides a mapping of funds contributed by different actors for the R&D and the expansion of the production capacity of COVID-19 vaccines, with a focus on those authorised in the EU. Nine vaccines are examined. It is found that governments, mainly the US (with some not-for-profit entities) decisively supported corporate investments, either for R&D, manufacturing, or both, by nearly EUR 9 billion, i.e. on average EUR one billion of grants per vaccine, with, however, vast variance across ...

In July 2022, the European Commission published its third annual rule of law report, which contains an individual chapter for each of the 27 EU Member States. In contrast to the rule of law reports from 2020 and 2021, this latest one makes country-specific recommendations to all Member States, something the European Parliament had been repeatedly calling for. This brings the rule of law report into closer alignment with the European Semester – as acknowledged by the third report itself. From originally ...

The IA provides a good overview of the problems relating to packaging and packaging waste, and the possible impacts of the various measures proposed to address the problems. In its assessment, which is both qualitative and quantitative, the IA relies on a wealth of data sources and modelling. However, it does not clearly indicate the IA supporting studies and their full references; this would have improved transparency. The IA presents three policy options, which are partially incremental and cannot ...