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Transcripts


t


Ministers and the European Parliament, and all these have a role in law-making. The European Commission is a non-elected organization, which is responsible for the day-to-day running of the EU. You can think of it as a civil service, or the administrators if you like, also called the ‘bureaucrats of Brussels’, which is where the Commission is based. Then you have the Council of Ministers, which consists of one minister from each of the member states, so these are ministers who are part of the government in their own countries. Do you remember this? Yes? No? But that’s clear, yeah, it is? Good. And finally we have the European Parliament, which consists of members who are elected in their own countries to work as full-time MEPs, that is Members of the European Parliament.


So, what roles do these organizations play in law-making and what is the difference between regulations and directives?


Well, first, regulations. So, regulations come either directly from the Commission or from the Council of Ministers and they tend to be concerned with pretty minor technical matters, for example, how much beef there needs to be in a beef sausage, for example or, how much real cream there has to be in ice cream. But they are not all trivial and unimportant things. There are regulations about standards of security in EU passports, for example.


And these regulations come into force as soon as they are published in what is called the Official Journal. So in other words, on the same day that these regulations are published, people in all the member states have to observe them, unless, and this is very important, unless individual member states have opted out of that particular area covered by the regulation. Yeah? Let me give you an example of what I mean by opting out. Both the UK and Ireland decided that they wanted to keep control of the whole area of visas and political asylum so they opted out. They said we will not be covered by EU regulation about those issues, yeah so that’s fine. So that’s regulations. Now what about directives? Well, there are two main differences. The first is that directives have to be accepted first by the Council of Ministers. The Commission cannot do this on its own and the European Parliament cannot do this on its own. Directives can only come from the Council of Ministers. And even then the directive does not become legally binding in any member state until the parliament of that state introduces domestic laws to give the directive effect. So, for


example, the directive comes from the Council of Europe, but it does not automatically become law in Britain, for example. It is only legally binding, it only has legal effect, when the British parliament passes a British law. So it is not the case that we are governed by European laws – many people believe that to be the case, but it is simply not true. There have to be British laws. Is that clear? I know it’s a bit complex.


CD2 Track 3 Ex 4.3


Listen to the extract and make notes on the lecturer’s definitions of both terms.


Market dominance and monopoly


What do I mean by making the distinction between market dominance and monopoly? We all know what a monopoly is, don’t we? It’s a single-firm case where the firm is in sole control of a market, and it’s protected by such high entry barriers that its position is not vulnerable to competition. It’s very rare in the real world for such firms to be in that happy position of being a complete monopoly. In the real world, however, you very often find that you have an approximation to dominance. Now, I’ve got an example … just looking for a single piece of paper. Oh, here we are. I undertook a study in the mid-’80s and it was quite easy for me to find 22 markets. The period covered, by the way, was mid-’70s to mid-’80s. It was quite easy to find a number of markets where the first firm had a share of 50% or above. In some cases much higher; closer to sort of 80 or 90% even. And the second-largest firm, or firms, were only half or less of the size, in terms of market share, of the dominant firm. So, although in many cases in the real world, you don’t have monopoly – you only find that usually in the case of natural monopoly – the notion of dominance, as I want to use it, is quite frequent. You do frequently find one firm with a very sizeable market share – as a rule of thumb, if you like, upwards of 50%, sometimes even as high as 80 or 90%. And the second- largest firm, or firms, has a share perhaps under 10%, or a number of smaller firms all of whom have quite small market shares. Now, I therefore mean by dominance that sort of market structure. The size distribution of firms is highly skewed. You’ve got one firm in pretty much command of the market but a number of other firms operating in the market in competition.


Listening


87


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