The European Commission wants to create Europe’s own system of “university rankings” to compete with the so-called “Shanghai classification” that has consistently left Europe trailing in the global competition among institutions of higher education. The European Commission has said that it will seek bids by the end of the year for a rival evaluation that would be ready by 2010. Announced in November 2008 by Odile Quintin, responsible for education and culture at the European Commission, the new approach to ranking universities is intended to be what she called “a credible alternative to the classification system of Shanghai.” The initiative is intended to produce a more comprehensive evaluation that will help make the European Union more competitive with the United States in attracting fee-paying students to degree studies. In France, which currently holds the rotating E.U. presidency, Valerie Pecresse, who is Minister for higher education and backs the initiative, said that this will help European students in orientating their studies.

Amid gloom in Europe, the consistently poor showing of universities in the EU, as measured by the Shanghai system, some researchers are challenging the methodology and validity of the system. Le Monde newspaper in Paris disclosed results of a recent study by the European Commission’s Centre Commun de Recherche. A research team led by Professor Andrea Saltelli found flaws in the Shanghai system that stemmed not from its approach but from its reliability. The conclusions appeared in English in a paper titled: Higher Education Rankings: Robustness Issues and Critical Assessments.

The analysis used a standard methodology for assessing “composite indicators” such as the classification. In the Shanghai system, rankings are set by factoring in several variables (in practice, it relies on six indicators), each with its own weighting. The EU study found that institutions could move up or down in the rankings by tens of places when the “weighting” assumptions were modified. For 96% of universities, the position varied by 10 places or more when the methodology was modified in some fashion or other. For example, the elite Ecole Normale Superieure in France, which ranked 73 in 2008 according to the Shanghai system, rose in 7 percent to between 26th and 30th when assumptions about one of the variables was changed. The EU study emphasized the problems of “establishing a reliable classification system” for an institution such as the Ecole Normale. The study said too much attention was being paid to the Shanghai system as an objective gauge.

European consumers and state-run health-care programs are being charged an extra €3 billion ($3.87 billion) annually because major pharmaceutical companies are creating barriers for the production and use of cheaper generic drugs, the European Commission says.

After a year-long probe into some of the leading companies’ practices, the commission said in a 400-page preliminary report that these multinationals “routinely use questionable tactics to delay market entry of generic drugs.”

While the Commission did not name names, Commission sources said that the companies included some of the world’s leading brands. EU antitrust chief Neelie Kroes warned in a news conference November 28 that “the Commission will not hesitate to open antitrust cases against companies where there are indications that the antitrust rules may have been breached.”

Tactics employed by the “originator companies” that the Commission singled out for blame include the seeking of hundreds of superfluous patents for popular medications to block generic manufactures from obtaining production rights; filing frivolous lawsuits against these manufacturers; and brokering back-room deals to keep medicines off the market for a period of time. The result was producers of generic drugs received more than €200 million in payments for keeping cheaper versions shelved.

The report’s discovery – big pharmaceutical companies are cheating on the system – will surprise people who have long admired European nations for their health-care policies aimed at keeping down cost to benefit consumers, including by the promotion of competition and the readiness to promote cheaper generics after the original patents on drugs have expired.

In 2007, European Affairs published an article in which Gretchen A. Jacobson, health economist with the Congressional Research Services, noted the price disparities between the U.S. and Western Europe for the same drugs and said that “the majority of researchers believe people in the U.S. pay more for certain pharmaceuticals than people in some western European countries.”

Noting that medication costs fall between 20 and 90 per cent after the introduction of generics, the Commission estimated that significant savings would have been possible had the medicines entered the market unabated, but this decrease in price provides incentives for pharmaceutical companies to maintain a stranglehold on production rights.

There is a widely held view European policies aimed at keeping drug prices low have had the long-term effect of driving cutting-edge medical research, development and innovation to the United States.

The White House announced today that it wants a new ambassador at NATO, Kurt Volker, currently Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Europe and Eurasia at the Department of State. His nomination will be submitted for senate confirmation shortly. The Bush administration seems to expect easy confirmation for Mr. Volker who has been a key aid under Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Dan Fried in rebuilding U.S.-European relations in the second Bush term.

European Affairs published a profile of Mr. Volker in conjunction with an interview with him in the current issue. He outlined the Administration priorities for its remaining months in office.

Before his appointment as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Europe and Eurasia at the Department of State, Mr. Volker served as the Director of NATO Policy and Acting Senior Director for Europe at the National Security Council.

The current Ambassador, Victoria Nuland, a career diplomat who has been in the post several years, is reportedly leaving government. Her husband, author Robert Kagan, recently published A Dangerous Nation on the history of American foreign policy. The second volume is due to appear this spring. His book was reviewed by European Affairs.