News and analysis on trade policy in Europe
Thursday, February 25, 2021
The European Union’s global trade in goods dropped overall in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. But the EU’s legendary trade surplus held up well – and so did trade with China. This contrasts with a dramatic drop in EU trade with the United States and …
Goods trade data collected by the European Union’s statistical agency reveal dramatic declines in 2020 so far as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In January to October 2020, extra-EU exports of goods fell to €1 579.4 bn, Eurostat finds. That is “a decrease of 11.3% compared with January-October 2019″. …
After a week dominated by EU-US trade news, here some other developments in trade policy in Brussels. By Sarah Anne Aarup and Iana Dreyer.
“Human mobility constitutes services trade in its own right, while also enabling trade in goods and other services,” reads a thought-piece on the impact of COVID-19 travel restrictions on international trade put together by the secretariat of the World Trade Organization.
It’s been quite a week in terms of trade news, with the launch of an EU healthcare initiative with the WTO’s Ottawa Group meeting and new plans to control foreign subsidies of companies operating in Europe. Below some other notable news. UK talks: European Parliament talks tough on LPF and …
The European Commission’s 2020 edition of its annual report on trade and investment barriers faced by European firms in international markets is written in an unusually alarmist tone. The report takes stock of barriers as reported by European companies. “At the end of 2019, 438 active trade and investment barriers …
Eurostat released first estimates of European Union trade in goods during the COVID-19 pandemic. The figures are staggering as expected, with extra EU-27 exports falling by 28.2% and exports by 22.7% in April 2020 alone compared to the same month last year. If one compares the trade performance cumulated over …
The trade week in the EU was significant, with new orientiations for policy spelt out as part of the bloc’s post-corona recovery plan. WTO: But the week in not entirely over as members of the WTO General Council meet today and next Tuesday online to confer about the next steps …
We had the trade wars. Now we have COVID-19. The collapse in cross-border trade is now firmly with us. The situation provides macabre joy to the non-humanist corners of Europe’s environmentalist and globalist movements. It certainly won’t be joyful to those who already see what negative economic growth and disrupted …
The WTO’s regular global trade forecast released today deserves special attention as it tries to grapple with the as yet hard-to-quantify impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global economic growth and on trade. Trade is always disproportionately negatively affected by economic shocks compared to global output. And this time is …
