Complete title: Contemporary integration Policies in Europe: Civic Integration Programmes and the Legal, Social and Cultural Position of Non-Citizens

Looking at solutions to modern integration problems, national governments in Europe increasingly resort to civic integration policies. These policies are meant to improve the knowledge of national language and society among the immigrant population. Increasingly, however, and due to their mandatory nature, these policies have a direct impact on the legal, social and cultural position of immigrants. Passing a language exam appears to be an essential prerequisite in order to enter a country, to acquire a more secure residence status, and to be eligible for naturalisation. The social dimension of integration seems to be more carefully dealt with, since the civic integration measures generally aim at increasing participation into society. Then again, the results so far do not give cause to highly optimistic conclusions. The cultural dimension is not left untouched either, since the integration courses increasingly insist on social and cultural incorporation. As will be discussed more in detail for the Netherlands, the establishment of civic integration policies has abruptly ended the period of multiculturalism, and has had serious consequences for the position of immigrants in Dutch society.

The Brewers of Europe commissioned a study on the economic impact of the brewing sector. The economic impact of the brewing sector has been analysed and described at both the level of Europe as a whole and at the level of individual countries. The study has focused on the 25 member states of the enlarged European Union (EU-25) and also on Norway, Switzerland, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey.

The economic impact of the brewing sector has been described in terms of employment due to the production and sale of beer, the contribution to the European economy in terms of value added and in terms of tax revenues collected by national governments. In the study we have distinguished between the direct and indirect impacts of the brewing sector, with the latter describing both the impact on supply sectors to the brewing sector and the impact of the sale of
beer on the retail and hospitality sectors. The report therefore gives some measure of the contribution that the brewing sector is making to the EU’s aims, within the Lisbon Strategy, of ensuring a more dynamic and stronger EU economy in the future.

The transformation of undeclared labour into regular labour is an important issue of the employment policy of the European Commission. For the development of adequate policy measures which can be implemented in all member states, it is necessary to have sufficient and comparable information on the extent and the nature of undeclared work in the various countries of the European Union. The feasibility study on a direct survey about undeclared work was designed to establish how and under which circumstances a direct survey can help to improve the knowledge base on undeclared work in Europe.

Depending on the method of measurement, undeclared labour accounts for between 3 and 15 per cent of European GDP. In most of the seven countries in this study, the fight against undeclared work is part of a general package of policy measures to promote employment and combat fraud.

This report contains a description and an analysis of the policies to combat undeclared work in seven Member States of the European Union: France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. After the analysis successful policy mixes are identified.

This overview report provides a typology of the potential approaches to and measures for tackling undeclared work. Such a resource could be used to provide a baseline against which the current approaches and measures used in the current 27 Member States of the European Union (EU27) can be assessed. The report looks specifically at the effectiveness of the policy measures used in five countries – Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom. The central finding is that EU countries currently remain heavily embedded in a ‘deterrence approach’, which seeks to increase the actual or perceived likelihood of detection and penalties.

In July 2004, the European Commission issued a new report on the extent of undeclared work around the EU. It looks at the incidence in each Member State, including the 10 new Member States that joined in May 2004, and examines the reasons behind the growth in undeclared work.

The issue of ‘undeclared work’ has been receiving increasing attention as part of the European employment strategy, and since 2003 the EU employment guidelines have included a specific guideline entitled ’transform undeclared work into regular employment’. This provides that Member States should develop and implement broad actions and measures to eliminate undeclared work, which combine simplification of the business environment, removing disincentives and providing appropriate incentives in the tax and benefits system, improved law enforcement and the application of sanctions. They should undertake the necessary efforts at national and EU level to measure the extent of the problem and progress achieved at national level.

In order to inform the debate and help Member States tackle the problem, on 2 July 2004, the European Commission published a report it had commissioned on Undeclared work in an enlarged Union. The report looks at the extent of the phenomenon around the EU, including in the 10 new Member States.

One of the objectives of the Lisbon programme of the European Commission is to promote active citizenship. In order to enable the monitoring of this objective, Regioplan performed a study for the European Commission. The study focused on the selection of indicators for citizenship and citizenship education, on quality and availability of data, and on future possibilities for monitoring.

In opdracht van de Europese Commissie heeft Regioplan een uitgebreide inventarisatie gemaakt van beleidsmaatregelen die door diverse EU-lidstaten worden ingezet om zwartwerk te bestrijden. Het rapport bevat naast genoemde inventarisatie een analyse van oorzaken van zwartwerk en beleidsaanbevelingen voor de lidstaten.