A new European Commission report highlights a selection of key barriers faced by EU companies and aims to raise awareness of the importance of addressing trade obstacles in such a way that they can fully reap the benefits of the global market.
The report is seen as underlining the Union’s market access strategy and as recognition of the calculation that 90% of global economic growth is expected to be generated outside the EU by 2015.
This third edition of the Trade and Investment Barriers Report (TIBR 2013) provides an account of the progress achieved on those barriers, identified in previous editions (2011 and 2012), that continue to be of concern to EU exporters and could not be fully solved to date.
It also highlights a number of new barriers that appeared in 2012 and require concerted action and political prioritisation both by the Commission and by the Member States in certain key markets.
As in the 2012 edition, this report focuses on market access barriers in some of the EU’s strategic partners (China, India, Japan, Brazil, Russia and the USA).
They represent the EU’s main export markets, in terms of goods (40.9% of goods exports in 2010), services (40.0%) and foreign direct investments (41.1% of FDI outward stock): the USA is the EU’s first export market, China second, Russia fourth, Japan sixth, India eighth and Brazil ninth.
“The focus of this report on some of the EU’s strategic partners does obviously not mean that barriers in other markets should be neglected,” the report stresses. “On the contrary, the Commission is actively engaging with a far broader group of trading partners to improve market access conditions for EU companies still confronted with a considerable number of trade obstacles.”
