Other forms of partnerships between research institutions, universities, hospitals or other bodies in developing countries and EU Member States to mitigate brain drain could include ‘shared work schemes’ in which scientists, researchers, doctors, technicians or other professionals from developing countries would share their work between an institution in their country of origin (University, hospital, research centre, etc.) and a partner institution in an EU Member State.

While a few years ago, enormous efforts were being made to combat unemployment by reducing working hours and introducing job sharing, there is now all of a sudden talk of extending the working hours and you mention shorter holidays.

Cartels are agreements and/or concerted practices between two or more competitors aimed at coordinating their competitive behaviour on the market and/or influencing the relevant parameters of competition through practices such as the fixing of purchase or selling prices or other trading conditions, the allocation of production or sales quotas, the sharing of markets including bid-rigging, restrictions of imports or exports and/or anti-competitive actions against other competitors.

In fact, what we need to do in the short term is to consider job sharing again.

I believe that, in her heart of hearts, even the rapporteur, Mrs Palacio Vallelersundi – whom I do, of course, congratulate on her work – shares these concerns.

(25) In its Statement of Objections of 20 March 1997 the Commission alleged that beginning in Denmark in or about November 1990, and progressively extending first to Germany in or about October 1991 and by late 1994 to the whole of the common market the addressees had infringed Article 85(1) by participating in a clandestine cartel by which they eventually divided the European market and individual national markets amongst themselves on the basis of a quota system; had agreed prices for the products and for individual projects; had allocated individual projects to designated producers and manipulated the bidding procedure in order to e ...[+++]nsure that the designated producer was awarded the project in question; and, in order to protect the cartel from competition, had taken concerted steps to damage Powerpipe's business, confine its activity to Sweden or force it out of business altogether.