Empowering the single market: A 10-point plan to revive and deepen it

Last year’s celebration of 30 years of the single market never gave equal attention to the failures of the ‘not-so-single market’. Empowering the single market is badly needed due to its many shortcomings, its many barriers (more than often assumed), various taboos and lingering distortions. If empowered with a medium-term programme, led by the European Council and actively implemented by the Commission and the European Parliament, it could boost the EU economy by some 9 % of EU GDP, and possibly more if greater dynamism is generated via a stimulus of startups, higher R&D investment and a greater use of the new Unitary Patent. This CEPS In-Depth Analysis report comprises both institutional and substantive proposals. Regarding the former, the Council troika should play an active role as was the case during the early Delors period (late 1985 to 1988), the Commission should firm up enforcement and the EP’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) Committee should hold annual enforcement sessions that give citizens and business a voice. On substance, the programme has to be ambitious. Two parallel action programmes are proposed for services under the 2006 Services Directive, and services under dedicated sector regulation (such as rail freight, banking and larger, competitive capital markets, and stepping up investment in cross-border interconnectors). Cases of ‘hard fragmentation’ ought to be abolished, with the consolidation of the telecoms market, addressing ill-coordinated spectrum frequencies, finally implementing the SES 2+ air traffic control system, and the fully-fledged shift from national to EU copyright regulation. Other recommendations include the immediate abandonment of the Commission’s revised approach to harmonised European standards (an approach that serves no useful purpose), the need to avoid values-driven EU regulation on typical ‘diplomacy’ issues that has severe costs to companies heavily reliant on global value chains, and improvements in the conditions for EU startups, thus boosting dynamism in the single market.