News and analysis on trade policy in Europe
Thursday, January 21, 2021
And the winner is…. the EU’s measurement instrument industry, perhaps. The European Commission recently published the final outcome of negotiations in the public procurement area agreed with Mexico as part of an upgrade of the EU Mexico Global Agreement. It took the two parties less than two years to upgrade …
Trade sniping out of Washington just doesn’t seem to be ending. Bloomberg reported yesterday that the White House was mulling pulling out of the Government Procurement Agreement, a preferential accord among a subset of mostly rich-country members of the World Trade Organization. China and Russia are in the process of …
The Finnish presidency of the European Council has tried to bring forward discussions among member states on how to bring forward a piece of legislation on public procurement aimed at creating ‘leverage’ vis-à-vis third countries with procurement markets that exclude European firms. The talks have started again, but the Council …
The European Commission no longer seems to trust global norms, fora or rule-making negotiations to uphold its interests in digital, competition, industry and trade policy. In fact many norms hardly exist and won’t likely emerge so quickly. The EU’s executive arm has been rethinking its policy toolkit and is seeking …
So, dear friends, we are going into a week-end with the United Kingdom ready to default into a no-deal Brexit on 12 April. Or most likely there will be a long extension of its EU membership, and potentially general (and European) elections…. This week was dominated by wrangles between France …
The UK has secured an agreement in principle that it can accede to the World Trade Organization’s Government Procurement Agreement once it leaves the EU next year, overcoming a range of concerns among other WTO members in the process. Borderlex learned about the deal today following the Committee on Government …
The UK must wait at least another month to learn the fate of its bid to accede to the World Trade Organization’s Government Procurement Agreement post-Brexit, after the latest meeting of member countries in Geneva failed to approve its accession bid. There are no fundamental obstacles to the UK’s request …
A read through amendments tabled by trade committee members in preparation of a report on and trip to China highlights Europe’s divisions vis-à-vis the Asian country. One of the few areas of consensus is support for Taiwan. A delegation of European parliamentarians is in China this week to assess EU-China …
This week was comparatively quiet. It was Easter, after all. There’s been some movement on the wider global trade war front. Don’t forget to read up on our two articles here and here. The headlines of these articles’ may say ‘China’ or ‘Japan’, but the pieces include a lot …
Among trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström’s pledges in her 2015 ‘Trade for All’ strategy there is stepping up the fight against corruption. This promise is gradually being translated into action with new anti-corruption provisions foreseen in the coming updated EU Mexico Global Agreement and recently launched EU Chile Association Agreement upgrade. …
