Publications

To aid policymakers in designing resilient and future-proof strategies, researchers have embarked on an innovative foresight process, envisioning four distinct versions of a sustainable EU in 2050 and the different pathways to get there starting from today. These visions and pathways shed light on the trade-offs and synergies, providing invaluable insights for the path before us. The results of this remarkable thought experiment, outlined in great detail in this recently published Science for Policy report, which fed into this year’s Strategic Foresight Report.

The European Commission presented the 2023 Strategic Foresight Report, which analyses how to put ‘sustainability and people's wellbeing at the heart of Europe's Open Strategic Autonomy' and suggests ten concrete actions to achieve this aim. The 2023 report provides an overview of the challenges we face and proposes ten areas for action to achieve a successful transition. To equip policymakers with economic indicators which also consider wellbeing, it proposes to adjust Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to take account of different factors such as health and the environment. This approach will bolster the EU's Open Strategic Autonomy and global standing in its pursuit of a resilient net-zero economy.

El sector público está empezando a incorporar herramientas basadas en inteligencia artificial, entre las que debemos destacar las destinadas a la lucha contra la corrupción y el fraude como una de las actividades de las administraciones más proclives al uso de herramientas basadas en inteligen- cia artificial. En el presente estudio se analiza cómo la unión de ciencias del comportamiento e inteligencia artificial pueden ser muy positivas para un adecuado control preventivo de la corrupción en la actuación de los servi- dores públicos, pero también abre la puerta a determinados riesgos propios del empleo de ambas técnicas (ciencias del comportamiento e inteligencia artificial), que deben tenerse en cuenta para así poder corregirlos.

Regulatory experimentation tools are used to test new economic, institutional and technological approaches, and legal provisions, outside of existing regulatory structures. This report focuses on regulatory sandboxes, where authorities engage firms to test innovative products or services that challenge existing legal frameworks. Participating firms obtain a waiver from specific legal provisions or compliance processes to innovate. This report presents lessons learnt from fintech regulatory sandboxes and their positive impacts, such as fostering venture capital investment in fintech start-ups. It covers challenges and risks involved in implementing regulatory sandboxes and their testing processes. This report presents policy considerations for AI regulatory sandboxes, including institutional interdisciplinary cooperation and the need to build up AI expertise within regulatory authorities. Findings underline the need for regulatory interoperability and the role that trade policy can play. Finally, it discusses the need for comprehensive criteria to determine sandbox eligibility and assess trials, and the potential impact of sandboxes on innovation and competition.

Markets are being populated with new generations of pricing algorithms, powered with artificial intelligence (AI), that have the ability to autonomously learn to operate. This ability can be both a source of efficiency and cause of concern for the risk that algorithms autonomously and tacitly learn to collude. In this paper we explore recent developments in the economic literature and discuss implications for policy.

The European Union (“EU”) Artificial Intelligence Act (the AI Act) is a legal medley. Under the banner of risk-based regulation, the AI Act combines two repertoires of European Union (EU) law, namely product safety and fundamental rights protection. Like a medley, the AI Act attempts to combine the best features of both repertoires. But like a medley, the AI Act risks delivering insufficient levels of both product safety or fundamental rights protection. This article describes these issues by reference to three classical issues of law and technology. Some adjustments to the text and spirit of the AI Act are suggested.

In this paper, we perform a preliminary analysis of the technologies, firms and industries that may be affected by the possible futures of the metaverse, attempting to derive some hypotheses on the spatial effects of this process. We distinguish between two possible evolutive scenarios – the ‘metaverse shaped by reality view’ and the ‘metaverse shaping reality view’ – and factors affecting them, deriving implications for public policy planning. The first scenario presents relatively traditional core policy challenges: ensuring homogeneous availability of network infrastructures as well as the skills indispensable to catch the new technological opportunities at the local level, accompanying the reallocation of factors of production associated to disruption and addressing inequalities. In the second, the main challenge is more radical: to ensure that desirable features are incorporated in the emerging virtual worlds from the start.

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