Integration of the European economic and legal framework and attractiveness of regional areas.

Summary In an integrated world where European legal systems are almost inevitably moving closer together, jurisdictions are developing attractive frameworks to capture tax bases. We propose to characterize the processes of legal integration at the European level and to justify the competitive nature of the institutional behaviors adopted by the European States, by defining in particular the dynamics of Community law. These sources make it possible, for example, to identify the different legal strategies for the approximation of normative frameworks implemented by the European authorities. They also give us a glimpse of institutional room for manoeuvre, which justifies and legitimizes a competitive analysis of the processes of Community legal integration and makes it relevant to define a framework for analyzing the attractiveness of jurisdictions according to an institutional competition approach. In addition, the analysis of the attractiveness of countries, particularly from an intangible and qualitative point of view, further justifies the legal approach to competition between EU Member States. Two types of spatial competition models are proposed to illustrate the institutional competition at work within the European space, namely a "shopping" approach that takes into account fiscal and institutional aspects of competition between States and a multi-stage institutional competition approach. Both analyses highlight the impact of intrinsic local characteristics (size, institutional public efficiency) on the nature of competition between European countries.