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German chancellor Angela Merkel and Chinas then vice-president Xi Jinping during a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2012. As the worlds largest trading bloc, the EU is an important strategic partner for China. Photograph: Diego Azubel/Reuters

The emergence of China as a major global player over the last two decades has forced the international community to forge a response to the rising power.

But while much of the attention has focused on the deepening ties between the US and China as part of President Barack Obamas pivot to Asia, the European Union has also been stepping-up its engagement with China.

As the worlds largest economic bloc, the EU is an important strategic partner for China. It is Chinas largest trading partner, while China is the EUs second-largest trading partner after the US. Trade between the two regions equates to more than 1 billion a day, with China the main source of imports for the EU, mainly comprising Chinese industrial and consumer goods.

Last spring President Xi Jinping visited Brussels, the first official visit of a Chinese leader to the EU institutions. To many, it was an important sign of the Chinese leaderships prioritisation of Europe.

At an official level, Chinese-EU trade relations stretch back to 1985 when the first EU-China trade and co-operation agreement was signed.

Over the next decade or so, trade between the two blocs increased dramatically, with the relationship structured around regular bilateral summits and within the forum of the EU-Asean meetings, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this year.

On the European side, the aim is to gain better access to Chinese markets for EU investors. As EU trade negotiators have pointed out, despite the strong trade in goods, trade in services between the two blocs remains low, with China accounting for just 2 to 3 per cent of overall European investments abroad.

Among the EUs main concerns are the high level of government involvement in enterprise, protection rights for intellectual property and a lack of transparency, though recent indications from Beijing that it is to open up the market to foreign direct investment have been warmly welcomed by Brussels.

Despite the willingness on both sides to consolidate trade ties, the EU-Sino relationship faces significant challenges.

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European Union seeks comprehensive investment agreement with China

MEU Vienna 2015: Message from MEP Eugen Freund
MEP and frontrunner of the Austrian Social Democrats for the European Elections 2014, Eugen Freund has a message for all potential MEU participants.

By: Model European Union Vienna

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MEU Vienna 2015: Message from MEP Eugen Freund - Video

Putin Says Russia Will Drop South Stream If EU Does not Approve it
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday Russia could not carry on with the South Stream gas pipeline project if the European Union was opposed to it. Speaking at a joint press conference...

By: WochitBusiness

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Putin Says Russia Will Drop South Stream If EU Does not Approve it - Video

One of the political tides over here in the European Union is against the very idea of tax competition. That is, against the idea that different states, different nations, should have different tax rules and rates and that people can thus move around either themselves or their activities so as to pick and choose where and how much they pay in tax. This campaign against tax competition is a pernicious one but it looks like its going to be quite powerful. Its worth therefore laying out what is the point of having tax competition in the first place. We dont have to go all the way to the near paranoia of Mancur Olsen, who described government merely as being stationary bandits out to fleece the populace, either. We can be a lot more moderate than that and still justify tax competition.

Theres mainstream opposition to tax competition as this shows:

Our citizens and our companies expect us to cope with tax avoidance and aggressive tax planning. It is our common duty to meet their expectation by ensuring that everyone pays its fair share of tax to the state where profits are generated, Germanys Wolfgang Schuble, Frances Michel Sapin and Italys Pier Carlo Padoan wrote in a joint letter seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Since certain tax practices of countries and taxpayers have become public recently, the limits of permissible tax competition between member states have shifted. This development is irreversible.

And theres this new campaign from rather further over in left field, from the European Greens:

The aggressive tax competition between EU member states makes it possible for multinational corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid their tax responsibilities. The only winners of this are the wealthiest, whether individuals or corporations, and the losers are the vast majority of European citizens and smaller businesses. We want the EU and European governments to finally take action and we want your support to put pressure on them so they do.

Their declared end goal is that tax rates across the different nations of Europe must be harmonised: expressly with the aim of making tax competition impossible.

Now it is possible just to don our Mancur Olsen blinkers and view this as those bandits, predators upon the population, making sure that none of the sheep to be shorn manage to escape. But we dont have to go quite that far (despite my often agreeing with that view of government).

Think through what we like about competition in the first place. That Exxon, Total Total and Statoil Statoil all compete to provide us with oil is something we rather like. Not, of course, because it benefits Exxon, Statoil and Total. Rather, because it hampers them, hinders them, in their activities. If there was only one monopoly oil supplier in the world then we would be at their mercy. They could charge us as they wished for that gasoline to drive our cars, oil to heat homes and so on. Indeed, weve a large area of economics looking at what monopolies tend to do and we conclude that theyre destructive to the interests of us consumers. That competition between different suppliers acts as a brake on what they can do to us consumers. Thats exactly why we like competition. Because it protects us, the consumers, against them, the producers.

Government, governance, is no different. We here, as the citizenry, are the consumers of governance. And just like we pay for oil when we want it then we also pay for governance in the form of taxes (sadly, whether we want that governance or not). Government is the oil company, the provider of that governance funded by our taxes. And in exactly the same manner we think that competition here is a good thing. For competition limits what they may do to us.

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The Terrible European Union Campaign Against Tax Competition

To stay competitive on a global scale, the European Union needs to mobilize the untapped potential and talent of women in all spheres, write a number of women leaders, after launching the EU Women Caucus on Tuesday (2 December 2014).

The signatories of this op-ed are:Margrethe Vestager, European Commissioner for Competition, Board Member of the EU Women Caucus,Stefano Sannino, Permanent Representative of Italy to the European Union,Iraxte Garca Perez, Chair FEMM, MEP, Co-Chair of the EU Women Caucus,Helga Stevens, Vice Chair ECR, MEP, Co-Chair of the EU Women Caucus,Sophiein t'Veld, Vice Chair ALDE, MEP, Co-Chair of the EU Women Caucus,Lara Comi, Vice Chair EPP, MEP, Co-Chair of the EU Women Caucus,Maria Joao Rodrigues, Vice Chair S&D, Co-Chair of the EU Women Caucus,Dimitrios Papadimoulis, Vice-President of the European Parliament, Co-Chair of the EU Women Caucus.

When a new European Commission has to be appointed, and the European Parliament faces the electorate at the ballot box, the quest for female leaders to achieve a fairer representation within the European institutions is placed high on the agenda.

The problem has been how to keep it there once the elections are over and the new Commission is in place.

It is in response to this that the EU Women Caucus has been launched on Tuesday (2 November). This is a unique cross-party and inter-institutional platform for discussion between leading women in the European Parliament, the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and the representations of the EU Member States to the European Union.

While being resolutely informal in its role, the EU Women Caucus is a means of building a network between women in positions of influence enabling them to keep the issue of the quest for female leaders as high on the agenda as it is during election periods.

2014 is a key time for the creation of such a platform. As an election year, it has offered a chance to put the EUs commitment to gender equality to the test. While managing to avoid scoring the lowest grade, the results are far from impressive. After the EU elections in May, just 37% of the Members of the European Parliament are women; there are also only nine women among the 28 European Commissioners.

This is, of course, a big step forward from when the European institutions were founded some decades ago. But far from the ambitions of 2010 when the European Commission issued a declaration upholding the idea that gender equality is a fundamental right, and reaffirming its commitment to pursuing the "fairer representation of women and men in positions of power in public life and the economy."

Much remains to be done to advance female leadership and to increase the number of women in top EU positions. And as an example, we can look no further than the EU Parliament itself: from the previous 2009-2014 parliament the number of women MEPs has risen by less than 2%: at this rate, it has been suggested, it will take 50 years to achieve full gender balance.

In a similar vein, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has stated it was pathetic that he had been unable to appoint more than nine women to the Commission despite his having urged national governments to put forward more. We wholeheartedly agree with him. The question is, though, what is to be done about it?

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Female leadership is a must, not an option