The chapter considers the powers of the central administrative and legislative institutions. The Commission comprises a college of twenty-seven Commissioners appointed for five years. It has four central types of power. It can adopt quasi-legislation. It proposes laws, policies and the budget. It administers EU policies. Finally, it has powers to police the observance of EU law. The Council of Ministers, comprised of national ministers, has the final power of decision over almost all fields of EU law. It votes either by unanimity or by Qualified Majority, where fifteen States representing 65 per cent of the Union population must vote for a measure. The European Council comprises the Heads of Government. Its central role is to provide political direction for the other EU Institutions. The European Parliament comprises 705 directly elected representatives. Depending upon the field, it has the power of veto over legislation, has to assent to it or must be consulted over it. The Parliament also has significant powers to hold the other EU Institutions to account. This chapter concludes by examining the circumstances when individuals can seek disclosure of documents from the EU Institutions.

The Eurogroup has played a central role in decision-making in the area of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) since its very inception. Nevertheless, it is one of those EU bodies that are least understood. This chapter focuses on the political and legal accountability of the Eurogroup, key aspects of which remained ill-defined for a considerable period of time. The discussion begins with the foundations and tasks of the Eurogroup (Section 2). The focus then shifts to the political accountability of the Eurogroup, the emphasis being on its relationship with the European Council and the Economic Dialogues with the European Parliament (Section 3.1). The chapter further looks at its legal accountability, in light of the relevant case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) (Section 3.2). The penultimate section of the chapter provides an assessment of the Eurogroup’s accountability in light of the framework laid down in the introductory chapter to this volume, namely in terms of procedural and substantive ways of delivering the normative goods of accountability (Section 4). Section 5 concludes by outlining the key features of the accountability arrangements and practices pertaining to the Eurogroup.

This chapter examines the commercial agency contract which is governed by Articles 418a–v of the Code of Obligations starting with the sources and characteristics of this contract as well as the delimitations with other contracts and the various types of agents found under Swiss law. This chapter then moves on to the conclusion of the commercial agency contract and analyses in detail the obligations of the commercial agent and the principal. This includes the agent’s obligation to negotiate or conclude contracts, duty of care, obligation of loyalty, liability for the proper performance of the contract by the customer and obligation to return and the principal’s general duty to assist the commercial agent, obligation to pay and other pecuniary duties. Finally, this chapter explores the end of the commercial agency contract including both ordinary and extraordinary causes of termination as well as the winding up of the contract.

This chapter outlines the EU’s seven official main institutions (the European Council, Council of the European Union, European Parliament, Commission, Court of Justice, Court of Auditors and European Central Bank) and the different executive, legislative and judicial powers that are allocated to them. It describes their tasks and the way they have organized their work. The EU’s combination of institutions is unique and can be characterized as ‘mixed government’ or as ‘a polity with many principals’. It is nevertheless based upon a common model for organizing democratic systems, namely that of consensualism, and aims to disperse power and constrain the use of it.

The EU exercises significant influence over global regulatory standards, whether as a result of its ability to unilaterally export its rules to foreign markets via market mechanisms–a phenomenon that I have elsewhere described as ‘the Brussels Effect’–or by entrenching them globally through bilateral or multilateral negotiations. In all cases, the legal expertise of the Commission is central. It either pro-actively supplies its expertise to their foreign counterparts or responds to the demand to offer technical expertise to create a rule-based order that closely imitates the regulatory state in Europe. Companies also resort to the Commission as their preferred forum, relying on the legal expertise residing in Europe to resolve disputes originating far outside the borders of the EU. This contribution discusses the channels through which the EU’s legal expertise migrates to foreign markets, the political forces behind this migration, as well as the economic, political, and legal implications that the extraterritorial reach of EU’s legal expertise has. It shows how current crises both in the EU internal and external dimension have opened up new spaces for legal expertise to operate.

The scope of EU law is not to be underestimated: in 2010, the acquis consisted of around 8,400 regulations and nearly 2,000 directives in addition to the primary law in the Treaties. These measures are no longer limited to economic issues but now also include instruments regulating health and safety, discrimination, criminal justice, as well as migration and asylum. Since 1992, Justice and Home Affairs matters have been coordinated in the EU and the Lisbon Treaty fully incorporated all issues related to these themes. Policing is thus now an EU competence, although these matters for now remain beyond the scope of the CJEU. This chapter will explore the methods to oversee the application and enforcement of EU law. In 1957, enforcement was predominantly the responsibility of the Commission as ‘guardian’ of the Treaties, supported by the threat of litigation before the CJEU.

Agents were crucial to the practice of international trade during the period covered by the book. They facilitated the import and export of goods, fixed shipping contracts, arranged insurance and conducted financial services for banks abroad. Agency patterns for goods changed and by about the middle of the nineteenth century sending goods to merchants abroad for sale on consignment was no longer as common as previously. For marketing reasons distributors of manufactured goods like motor vehicles were described as the ‘agents’ of manufacturers, but they were not true agents in law. Agents also came into their own in various parts of the world as so-called managing agents of plantations, mines and factories, and in the result became the fulcrum of powerful business groups. Through doctrines such as undisclosed principal and reasonable compliance with a principal’s instructions, and through devices such as the commission, del credere and confirming agent, the law went further in meeting commercial need. English law recognised that an agent should not always ‘drop out’ of the picture but should bear some responsibility for the underlying principal–third party contract if a transaction went wrong. The courts glossed over doctrinal difficulties to meet commercial need.

The EU member states engage in budgeting through a set of supranational fiscal procedures outlined in EU treaties and supporting legislation. The EU itself is a suprnational government with its own budget and budgetary institutions, procedures, and programs. It enforces these macrobudgetary rules that significantly constrain the policy decisions of the individual member states.

This chapter examines the nature of trusteeship and the possible actions for breach that can be brought by the beneficiaries. Breach can arise by commission [actively commiting a breach of trust]or by omission [failing to carry out a duty owed by the trustee]. The duties of a trustee arise either under common law or under statute or under the trust instrument. A trustee is liable for any breach of trust that causes a loss to the beneficiaries and must restore the equivalent value. The trustee will only be liable for a breach that caused the loss to the fund and the claimant must establish a causal link. The liability of trustees is joint but the beneficiaries can choose to only sue one trustee but in some cases the court may indemnify a trustee such as where one trustee has acted fraudulently. The beneficiaries may be able to claim interest as well as compensation from the fund. Trustees may be able to rely on an exemption clause which will exonerate them from liability. If there is no exemption clause trustees may be able to rely on other defences such as consent of the beneficiaries or the statutory defence under s.62 Trustee Act 1925.

This chapter instills an appreciation for the powerful effects (both positive and negative) of performance pay on employee behavior. It opens with a performance-pay success story, namely a field experiment by Shearer (2004) in which the piece-rate compensation of Canadian tree planters was changed. It then develops some examples of the darker side of performance pay, including the Wells Fargo employees who opened false accounts to meet a quota. Section 9.2 provides visual representations of performance pay in which the pay graph has a positive slope (i.e., it increases when the worker’s performance measure increases), sometimes linearly as with piece-rate pay and sometimes nonlinearly as with bonuses. The chapter emphasizes the incentive and sorting effects associated with performance pay as well as its prevalence. Workers’ attitudes towards risk (of earnings fluctuations) and how risk affects performance pay is covered, along with performance measurement, various drawbacks of performance pay, and how to design performance-pay contracts. Readers will finish the chapter with an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of performance pay and when it can be effectively used.

This chapter instills an appreciation for the powerful effects (both positive and negative) of performance pay on employee behavior. It opens with a performance-pay success story, namely a field experiment by Shearer (2004) in which the piece-rate compensation of Canadian tree planters was changed. It then develops some examples of the darker side of performance pay, including the Wells Fargo employees who opened false accounts to meet a quota. Section 9.2 provides visual representations of performance pay in which the pay graph has a positive slope (i.e., it increases when the worker’s performance measure increases), sometimes linearly as with piece-rate pay and sometimes nonlinearly as with bonuses. The chapter emphasizes the incentive and sorting effects associated with performance pay as well as its prevalence. Workers’ attitudes towards risk (of earnings fluctuations) and how risk affects performance pay is covered, along with performance measurement, various drawbacks of performance pay, and how to design performance-pay contracts. Readers will finish the chapter with an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of performance pay and when it can be effectively used.