Is EU law still overwhelming?

Three research publications have recently contributed to the debate, which is still hampered by methodological difficulties and largely influenced by underlying political considerations:

1/ Open Europe: The row over the weight of EU law continued this week following the publication of an updated report by Open Europe  claiming that regulation cost Britain's economy £176 billion (€199bn) since 1998 with £124 billion (€140bn) or 71% from EU legislation. It cost £32.8 billion (€37bn) in 2009 with 59% due to complying with EU rules. Open Europe is known to be close to the British conservative party. See recent post on the conservative blog.

The Commission responded: "The Open Europe study lacks rigour and is intentionally misleading. The headline figures suffer from a methodological bias. It confuses stocks and flows [and] it suffers from double-counting. It does not consider what repealing EU regulations would imply either in terms of foregone benefits or alternative regulatory costs." (reported by Euractiv)

2/ Study by Notre Europe, a Brusels think tank founded by J. Delors, dispels, with unpublished quantitative data, the "myth" that 80% of legislation is of EU origin. It claims that "the impact of EU normative interventions is substantial, yet often incidental or regulatory in scope, and, overall, is not as important as claimed, except in certain specific public policy sectors";

3/ The research project "Europeanizing Legislation" has shown that only 10.6 per cent of all laws in force in Austria originated with the EU. This contradicts the impression that the national legal system is dominated by the EU. As many topical issues can only be solved at the European or international level, the authors of the study are convinced that the EU's share of influence will continue to grow.