The MAXCAP Working Paper No. 20 “Notified and Substantive Compliance with the EU Law in an Enlarged Europe: Evidence from Four Policy Areas” by Asya Zhelyazkova, Cansarp Kaya and Reini Schrama has been published. You can download the Working Paper here. 

Whereas quantitative studies show that the ‘new’ EU entrants from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are the forerunners in the transposition of EU directives, detailed case studies indicate the existence of a gap between legal and practical compliance. This study aims to reconcile these divergent findings by comparing the member states’ performance regarding different compliance aspects: delayed transposition, correct legal implementation, and correct practical implementation. We address the following questions: Is there a systematic variation in compliance (a) among different EU member states and (b) across different forms of compliance? To what extent do preference- and capacity-based factors explain the differences in im- plementation between the EU-15 and EU-10 states? Our analysis shows that the CEE member states are generally more efficient in transposing the EU rules than their Western counterparts. Moreover, with the exception of Social Policy directives, the CEE member states do not lag behind the EU-15 countries with respect to practical implementation.

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