Bill Mitchell — EU Services Notification Directive will undermine democracy within cities

In a blog post last week – Financial services agreements – the EU as a neoliberal, corporatist project (November 13, 2018) – I wrote about the way the EU compromised the capacity of elected Member State governments to advance the well-being of their nations by the way they negotiate trade arrangements in services, particularly with respect to the financial services sector. For all those Europhiles that regularly deny the core agenda of the EU is to compromise democratic outcomes in favour of capital, that analysis, alone, should be sufficient to discourage those thoughts. Of course, that isn’t the only manifestation of this neoliberal, corporatist bias in the way the EU has developed over the last decades. I mostly conduct my analysis at the macroeconomic level but I am also interested (as my publication record demonstrates) in urban and regional analysis. At the level of the European city, the EU is behaving in the exactly the same way – to curb that ability of city authorities to render their cities favourable environments for the residents who live there....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
EU Services Notification Directive will undermine democracy within cities
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia