Languages in the European Union: The Quest for Equality and its Cost

Jan Fidrmuc and Victor Ginsburgh

William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series from William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Abstract: The European Union has recently expanded from 15 to 25 countries. In line with this enlargement, the list of official EU languages has grown from 11 to 20. Currently, the EU extends equal treatment to all member countries’ official languages by providing translations for documents and interpreting services for meetings and sessions of the European Parliament. This, however, is costly, especially when recognizing that many Europeans speak one of the procedural languages of the EU, English, French or German, either as their native language or as a foreign language. We compute disenfranchisement rates that would result from using only the three procedural languages for all EU business, and marginal costs per disenfranchised person associated with providing translations and interpreting into the remaining 17 languages. The marginal costs are shown to vary substantially across the different languages, raising important questions about the economic efficiency of equal treatment for all languages. We argue that an efficient solution would be to decentralize the provision of translations.

Keywords: Languages; Disenfranchisement; European Union; Cost and benefit analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 O52 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2004-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Languages in the European Union: The quest for equality and its cost (2007)
Working Paper: Languages in the European Union: The quest for equality and its cost (2007)
Working Paper: Languages in the European Union: the quest for equality and its cost (2007)
Working Paper: Languages in the European Union: The Quest for Equality and its Cost (2006)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wdi:papers:2004-715

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