Several recent papers have summarised the status of EU implementation studies. In this paper we suggest that the issue of sector specific resources has received too little attention in previous studies. Sector specific resources include “health sector resources” and “state administrative resources”. Our theoretical contribution is thus to add an explicit and more detailed concern for "sector specific resources" in national transposition. This can refine the understanding of resources, for example in the multi-variable models that are emerging as the state of the art in the field of EU implementation studies.
To illustrate these points we have chosen an empirical design focusing on a directive with a potentially high impact on system resources and several ambiguous components (the Cross Border Health Care Directive). We have further chosen to focus on two Eastern European countries (Bulgaria and Poland), where limited resources within their health care systems are an important concern.