Distributive implications of European integration

One of the main pitfalls of European construction is undoubtedly the alleged charge that it impedes redistributive policy at the national level. This charge is indeed widespread in political circles and in the medias; yet it had received little attention among economists up to recently. Over the last few years, an increasing amount of research has been devoted to that accusation or, to be more neutral, to that conjecture. The purpose of our paper is to survey this literature. We first present the conventional wisdom according to which mobility makes redistribution difficult if not impossible. We also discuss the most important qualifications to this result, and the solutions that are generally advocated and that imply some sort of cooperation. In a second part, we consider a different issue, that of redistribution across countries. It assumes the existence of some supranational government, which is not trivial. In addition, informational differences between the national and the supranational governments are shown to play a crucial role.