Latest commentaries

Europe's ‘parallel' civil service?

A thorough evaluation of existing decentralised agencies and inter-institutional dialogue will help answer the question of how to organise European administration.

An angel and the devil in hell on earth

Timur's first memory was the sound of Russian bombs smashing Grozny. At age one his father, a Chechen resistance fighter, was killed in a rocket attack. At age three his mother died. At age five, [...]

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Recent commentaries

NGOs need to come clean over funding, too

An NGO is only ‘non-governmental' if it is independent of government funding and influence – and transparency is only as good as how the information is used.

Forsaking the private sector won't boost R&D

At this week's World Health Assembly (19-24 May), WHO members, including EU representatives, will discuss a noble and morally challenging goal – finding ways to achieve more research into medicines for the world's poor. Discussions will focus on the possibility of replacing the market-driven innovation system, based on the protection of intellectual property rights, with a centrally planned regime of compulsory licences, patent pools and prize funds that would try to control the direction of innovation via government preferences.

How to create a future for biofuels

Liquid biofuels – ethanol and ‘biodiesel' – have captured the worldwide and European fascination as renewable energy for the transport sector, but the tide seems to be turning now that people are realising the inherent challenges of leaping into a liquid biofuels policy in the absence of adequate consideration of the down-stream results.