09 January 2023

EURACTIV: EU Commission celebrates 30 years of the Single Market

The EU established its Single Market on 1 January 1993 by removing barriers to the movement of goods, services, labour, and capital following the signature of the Single Act in 1987 and the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.

The European Commission celebrated the 30th anniversary of the EU’s Single Market as a driver for growth that supports Europe’s economic and political power at a global level.

“It has for thirty years been the fundament of the EU,” the EU Commission’s Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager said in a statement on Tuesday (3 January), adding that it provided “opportunities for millions of businesses as well as for consumers in Europe”.

In a kick-off event in Prague in early December, Commissioner Thierry Breton hailed the creation of the Single Market as an “electroshock”.

“It gave Europe the means to shape, at last, its political and economic destiny,” he said.

“Three decades later, the European Union has the world’s largest democratic Single Market,” he added, tacitly acknowledging that the Chinese economy overtook the EU economies in size – under the condition of purchasing power parity – over the course of the past decades. Back in 1993, the Chinese GDP stood at only about a quarter of the German GDP.

The Commission’s press release also stressed that the Single Market “played a key role in accelerating the economic development of new Member States that joined the EU”.

Economist André Sapir, a senior fellow at the economic policy think tank Bruegel, agreed that the Single Market was a “big success”, especially for countries in Central and Eastern Europe that joined the EU after the establishment of the market.

“When I look at what has happened in terms of convergence since these countries joined the EU, I cannot see any other explanation than the Single Market,” Sapir told EURACTIV.

An analytical paper published by the Commission in late December showed that the Single Market was particularly successful in integrating the goods market.

Trade in goods among the 28 countries that formed the Single Market until Brexit rose both as a share of the EU’s GDP and the trade in goods of these countries with the rest of the world.

The picture looks less rosy in the service trade, however. While trade in services among the 28 countries also rose as a share of the EU’s GDP, trade in services with the rest of the world rose by the same amount.

Anna Cavazzini, Green member of the European Parliament and chair of the Parliament’s internal market committee, described it as “indispensable to our daily lives” in a press release on 1 January.

However, she warned that the achievements of the Single Market could not be taken for granted and that it had to “take a bold step forward” to help the EU weather the crises ahead....

 more at EURACTIV

© EURACTIV