Centre for European Policy Studies

In 2012, 22 EU countries signed the Fiscal Compact, an intergovernmental agreement aimed at backing EU fiscal rules with national arrangements. The main goal of the initiative was to strengthen compliance through an automatic correction mechanism triggering fiscal adjustment in case public finances deviate from 'the path of virtue'. Although the Compact de facto ceased to exist with the 2024 reform of the EU fiscal framework, it still offers useful insights for the future. Our analysis shows that better compliance was associated with a superior design of the correction mechanism, higher government efficiency and a stronger media presence of independent fiscal institutions. Economic growth can make up for a less sophisticated design. We also show that many countries had linked the trigger of the correction mechanism to decisions at the EU level. This choice defeated the original purpose of correction mechanisms to decouple key fiscal policy decisions from political considerations and discretion and bodes ill for 2024 reform of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP).

Background and Aim:Chronic neck pain is often associated with impaired cervical proprioception and motor control. Laser-based visuomotor feedback systems have emerged as promising tools to assess and retrain cervical function; however, their reliability properties remain underexplored. This cross-sectional study aimed to evaluate the intra-rater test-retest reliability of a laser-based feedback device for assessing head movement control in individuals with chronic neck pain. Methods:To assess proprioceptive control and head movement precision, a custom-built laser-based visuomotor feedback device was employed. Thirty participants with chronic neck pain, aged between 25 and 65 years, who were referred to Esteghlal Physiotherapy Clinic in Tehran, completed two identical test sessions, 24 h apart. Each participant performed three trials for each of four predefined head movement paths (1-1, 2-2, 3-3, and A-G) using a laser pointer mounted on the forehead, which projected a beam onto a screen. Movement speed and success (percentage of path completed without deviation) were recorded. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) with 95% confidence intervals, standard error of measurement (SEM), and minimal detectable change at 95% confidence (MDC95) were calculated for speed and success metrics to assess test-retest reliability. Results:The device demonstrated good to excellent reliability. ICC values for speed ranged from 0.868 to 0.958 across all paths, and for success from 0.753 to 0.963, with all p-values < 0.001. Paths 2-2 and 3-3 showed the highest reliability for both metrics. Averaging across both sessions slightly improved consistency, suggesting a benefit in multi-day assessments. For averaged measures, SEM for speed ranged 0.065-0.122 s/cm (MDC95 0.180-0.339 s/cm) and SEM for success ranged 7.71-19.08 mm (MDC95 21.37-52.90 mm), with the largest absolute error observed for success on the complex A-G trajectory. Conclusion:The laser-based visuomotor feedback system demonstrated good to excellent reliability for assessing cervical motor control within a small sample of individuals with chronic neck pain recruited from a single clinical setting. The inclusion of absolute reliability indices confirmed the system's consistency and precision across different trajectories. These findings support its potential as a practical and reliable tool for both clinical assessment and research applications in sensorimotor control.

The climate literature has grown faster than review teams can read it. That gap matters most for a concept like the environmental social tipping point, the threshold at which a small change triggers rapid, self-reinforcing change in a social system. Evidence of this kind of shift is usually contained in one or two paragraphs within a longer document. As a result, existing text mining tools-which categorize entire documents by topic or highlight isolated claims-leave an expanding set of important evidence without any systematic method for discovery or organization. This paper presents an open and modular transformer-based framework that detects and structures social tipping point evidence at the passage level. The framework joins five components into a single deployable workflow: a DistilBERT boundary splitter for segmentation, an iteratively augmented RoBERTa classifier for detection, a Mistral 7B model that rewrites each detected passage for clarity, a LLaMA 3.2 3B model that rates the passage against five published social tipping point criteria, and a Milvus vector store for semantic retrieval. The system is wrapped in a Streamlit interface backed by MinIO object storage. Evaluated on a 163-passage benchmark labelled by GPT-4.1 and a 51-passage set reviewed by experts, the splitter surpassed three competing methods on a nine-metric composite score (6.137). The tuned RoBERTa model achieved 71.4 percent accuracy with a Cohen's kappa of 0.337 on the full benchmark, and 87.5 percent accuracy with a kappa of 0.742 on passages with labels, outperforming both a climate-focused model and untuned language models.

Abstract Non-Technical Summary EU building policy faces interlinked challenges: issues like the housing crisis and energy poverty persist, while buildings contribute significantly to global resource consumption and related environmental impacts. Resolving these issues may require more than improvements in efficiency and clean technology. Sufficiency offers a complementary strategy – reducing the resource consumption of buildings to what is really needed while ensuring decent living standards for all. Yet, the role of sufficiency in EU building policies remains underexplored. This study assesses how sufficiency is integrated into EU policies, identifying key gaps and opportunities for strengthening it in the building sector. Technical Summary Buildings are responsible for a large share of the EU’s resource consumption and environmental impacts, while access to living space is highly unequal. Technological innovation alone may not adequately address this social-ecological challenge; however, sufficiency offers a complementary solution. Most research on sufficiency policy for buildings examines national or subnational policies, leaving the EU level underexplored, while studies on policy mixes rarely assess the built environment in an EU context. Our study addresses these gaps by providing, to the best of our knowledge, the first investigation into how sufficiency is integrated into EU policies for the built environment. We use content analysis, applying a conceptual framework for sufficiency with four dimensions: reduced consumption, environmental sustainability, behavioural and lifestyle change, and equitable welfare. The findings indicate that the EU policy mix for buildings incorporates measures in all four sufficiency dimensions, although the social aspects are acknowledged to a lesser extent. Most measures remain technical, but some exceptions align more with existing suggestions for sufficiency policy. Still, we spot significant gaps in the policy mix. This highlights the potential for the EU to adopt sufficiency principles by strengthening existing measures and combining them with more ambitious approaches. Social Media Summary An analysis of EU building policies through the lens of sufficiency: balancing environmental goals and societal needs.