Italy bottom of the internal market league

By Tim King

Date: 20/07/05

The countries that have done the least in the last year to put into effect the European Union's laws on the single market are Italy, Luxembourg, Greece and Portugal, according to the European Commission's internal market scoreboard.

Although the Czech Republic, Latvia, Estonia and France languish among the poorest performers, they have made "serious progress" in the last year to reduce the backlog of EU legislation that has not been transposed into national law. The Netherlands has brought its deficit down from 2.8% last year to 1.6%. The best performing countries are Lithuania, Hungary and Slovenia, with Denmark and Finland the best among the EU15.

EU leaders agreed in 2001 that the so-called transposition deficit should be brought down to less than 1.5%. Only 11 of the 25 member states are below that target (see table). The EU average is now 1.9%, which is the second best result since the monitoring started ten years ago.

But 245 internal market directives, or 15%, have not been transposed on time in at least one state. In some cases, transposition is more than two years behind the deadline.

Since last July's scoreboard, nine countries have increased their backlog. Portugal increased its deficit by 25 directives, Italy by 19 and Luxembourg by 15.

The Commission also made an assessment of the performance of member states in transposing laws that were part of its financial services action plan (FSAP). Of the 42 measures, legislative and non-legislative, 23 are directives, of which 18 should already have been transposed.

Only Denmark and Austria have transposed them all. Germany, Estonia, Cyprus, Malta and Poland has only one directive awaiting transposition.

At the other end of the scale, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are the worst performing.

But the application of the internal market rules is imperfect. The Commission warns that no member state is on course to meet the target of reducing by 50% the number of infringement proceedings against them, comparing 2006 with 2003. Only four of the old EU15 states have reduced the number of infringement cases against them: Belgium, Austria, France and the Netherlands.

The countries with the most infringement cases are Italy (152) France (117), Spain (113) Germany (105) and Greece (88).

The European Commission on 18 July 2005 published the 14th edition of its Internal Market Scoreboard on the performance of Member States as to the transposition of Internal Market legislation into national law and the quality of subsequent implementation. Article summarises the results of this latest scoreboard.

European Commission: Press Release: IP/05/961, 'EU on the right track in implementing the Internal Market' http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/05/961&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

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