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As long as they can’t agree on how to distribute migrants internally, EU capitals will continue to focus on striking deals with countries to take back rejected asylum seekers and beefing up border security, writes Luigi Scazzieri at the Centre for European Reform.

In this 20-minute podcast, Sander Tordoir of the Centre for European Reform gives a very good explanation of the Commission’s recently announced plan on how it wants to reform the EU’s infamous fiscal rules.

John Springford, the deputy director of the Centre for European Reform (CER) think-tank, says Brussels has also grown frustrated with the Swiss system of translating EU legislation into its rulebook through and torturous parliamentary process that can end up changing the laws to bypass regulations. “This is very finicky and slow. And it runs up against the EU’s problem of cherry picking: they don’t want to give the UK partial access to the single market or part of partial participation in the single market,” he said.

To meet EU-wide emergency targets for the reduction of electricity and gas demand, more actionable information campaigns are needed, writes the Centre for European Reform. Governments should also encourage utilities to set up incentive schemes to reward energy savings.

"Around half of the fiscal hole, and the political instability that comes with that, is down to Brexit," John Springford of the Centre for European Reform said on Twitter in October, in an exchange on the relationship of the UK's EU membership to its economic performance.In a CER report in June, he commented on a £29 billion (€33.2 billion) package of tax rises announced earlier in the year by Rishi Sunak, then finance minister -- up "to their highest share of GDP since the 1960s", he said.

The Chips for Europe Initiative's €11 billion focused on commercializing research "would still punch below its weight" even if it all materializes, said Zach Meyers, a senior research fellow at London-based think tank Centre for European Reform. Meyers estimates that the U.S.'s chips strategy promises $13.2 billion in research.

But this week shifted “the trajectory in an almost dramatic way,” said Luigi Scazzieri, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, adding that an escalation of the current disagreements could throw relations back into “the darkest phase in Italian-French relations” in recent memory.