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Languages in the European Union: The Quest for Equality and its Cost

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  • Jan Fidrmuc

    ()

  • Victor Ginsburgh

    ()

Abstract

The European Union has recently expanded from 15 to 25 countries. In line with this enlargement, the list of official EU languages has grown from 11 to 20. Currently, the EU extends equal treatment to all member countries’ official languages by providing translations for documents and interpreting services for meetings and sessions of the European Parliament. This, however, is costly, especially when recognizing that many Europeans speak one of the procedural languages of the EU, English, French or German, either as their native language or as a foreign language. We compute disenfranchisement rates that would result from using only the three procedural languages for all EU business, and marginal costs per disenfranchised person associated with providing translations and interpreting into the remaining 17 languages. The marginal costs are shown to vary substantially across the different languages, raising important questions about the economic efficiency of equal treatment for all languages. We argue that an efficient solution would be to decentralize the provision of translations.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan in its series William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series with number 2004-715.

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Length: 17 pages
Date of creation: 01 Jul 2004
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:wdi:papers:2004-715

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Keywords: Languages; Disenfranchisement; European Union; Cost and benefit analysis;

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  1. Ginsburgh, Victor & Ortuño-Ortín, Ignacio & Weber, Shlomo, 2005. "Disenfranchisement in Linguistically Diverse Societies: The Case of the European Union," CEPR Discussion Papers 4875, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
  2. Shlomo Weber & Victor Ginsburgh, 2004. "Languages Disenfranchisement in the European Union," Working Papers 2004.4, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
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Cited by:
  1. Fidrmuc, Jan & Ginsburgh, Victor & Weber, Shlomo, 2009. "Voting on the choice of core languages in the European Union," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 56-62, March.
  2. Victor Ginsburgh & Shlomo Weber, 2007. "La connaissance des langues en Belgique," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/5265, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
  3. Alexander Muravyev & Oleksandr Talavera, 2010. "Can State Language Policies Distort Students' Demand for Higher Education?," University of East Anglia Applied and Financial Economics Working Paper Series 023, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..
  4. Mejer, Malwina & van Pottelsberghe, Bruno, 2008. "The London Agreement and the Cost of Patenting in Europe," CEPR Discussion Papers 7033, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.

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