According to Alliance for Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU) a number of actors are absent from the European Union Transparency Register (EUTR) although they are engaged in lobbying activities either directly or indirectly.

The new Minsk agreement calls for

The medical devices industry constitutes a key sector for healthcare. It is one of the most innovative sectors, improving and saving lives every day by providing innovative solutions for diagnosis, prevention and treatments. The medical devices industry is also a major employer in Europe. However these companies face challenges of national, European and international dimensions that may have an impact on their innovation capacity and their competitiveness. These difficulties might have consequences on the health of European citizens.

The treaty establishing the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) entered into force on 1st January 2015. It includes Armenia; Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia, with Kyrgistan to join in May 2015. At this time, the Eurasian Union represents 175.7 million people. 

Starting in September 2017, the move to automatic information exchange will make it much easier for tax authorities to track down tax cheats.

More than 65 countries have already publicly committed to implement automatic information exchange, including offshore financial centres such as Switzerland, Luxembourg, Singapore and the British Crown and Overseas Territories. Other centres such as Dubai and Panama have signalled that they will resist the transparency initiative;

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is a global network of 185 investigative journalists in more than 65 countries who collaborate on in-depth investigative stories. Founded in 1997 by the respected American journalist Chuck Lewis, ICIJ was launched as a project of the Center for Public Integrity to extend the Center’s style of watchdog journalism, focusing on issues that do not stop at national frontiers: cross-border crime, corruption, and the accountability of power.

While there is a large body of EU innovation policy to build on, the EU’s conception of innovation fails to take account of the true breadth of innovative activities and processes that can contribute to societal progress. There has been an unfortunate failure to understand that support for innovation is not the same as support for R&D. Innovation cannot be organised by decree. It comes from people, and only people. Innovation is neither an explicitly economic process, nor indeed an objective itself.

Regional business clusters (RBCs) in Western Balkans are scarce and institutional support for national clusters is very limited . Any existing clusters in the region are the outcome of external donors’ policies rather than genuine local initiatives; they have very limited government support although they are national in character and nature; awareness of clustering advantages is very low, even for their members. In other words, they are underdeveloped, while good practices are missing due to the fact that they are rather new initiatives without precedents.

Proposals  expressed by Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference.

There seems to be a real discrepancy between the rhetoric on the American side of the Atlantic and the European side. Within the EU clearly there is also a division of opinions. There are more hawkish nations: Poland, the Baltic states have gotten even further than the US in providing military assistance to Ukraine. And on the other hand, Germany, France, Britain and Denmark have ruled it out so far.