Businesses call for fresh political engagement to renew economic integration in the Single Market

On 27 June, Eurochambres together with four other major European business organisations, published a common call to renew economic integration in the single market. Together, Business Europe, Digital Europe, the European Roundtable, EuroCommerce and Eurochambres represent small and large businesses across the whole spectrum of sectors.

The statement comes as the von der Leyen Commission reaches the halfway point in its 2019-2024 mandate.

More relevant than these milestones is the current context in which businesses need to operate, characterised by the economic impact of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, spiralling energy costs, supply chain disruption and accelerating inflation.

In such challenging businesses environment, the best way to ensure Europe’s prosperity is to revitalise the single market. The signatory organisations concur that the single market has not been given the attention it deserves and that its development has stalled over the past decade.

This finding is very much in line with the perception of entrepreneurs in the chamber network, of which 70% replied “No” to the question “Is the Single Market sufficiently integrated, allowing your company to operate and compete freely?” in a Eurochambres survey. The perception must be right as per the European Commission’s estimate, the benefits of removing barriers to the single market for goods and services could amount to €713 billion by the end of 2029.

The statement expresses the view that businesses do not experience the single market as a true free trade area. There are different causes for this: unequal transposition of EU law, weak enforcement policy and a tendency to overregulate. In short, we witness a discrepancy between the expressed ambitions for the single market and what we see in practice. In order to ensure our competitiveness and our place in the world, we need a “180-degree shift” in single market policy.

Read the joint statement

Policy-makers at EU and national level are urged to therefore reinstate the idea of the single market as an economic union for free trade without internal obstacles and bring freedom back to the top of the political priorities. The statement sets out a range of broad recommendations touching on different areas. But fundamentally, we call on policy-makers to put the single market at the heart of European policy-making again.

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