EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Flexible Integration? Mandatory and Minimum Participation Rules

Bard Harstad

Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 2006, vol. 108, issue 4, 683-702

Abstract: For a club such as the European Union, an important question is whether a subset of the members should be allowed to form “inner clubs” and enhance cooperation. Flexible cooperation allows members to participate if and only if they benefit, but it leads to free‐riding when externalities are positive. I show that flexible cooperation is better if the heterogeneity is large and the externality small, but that rigid cooperation is the political equilibrium too often. Both regimes, however, are extreme variants of a more general system combining mandatory and minimum participation rules. For each rule, I characterize the optimum and the equilibrium.

Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9442.2006.00475.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:scandj:v:108:y:2006:i:4:p:683-702

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0347-0520

Access Statistics for this article

Scandinavian Journal of Economics is currently edited by Richard Friberg, Matti Liski and Kjetil Storesletten

More articles in Scandinavian Journal of Economics from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:bla:scandj:v:108:y:2006:i:4:p:683-702