Business looks for new openings

Date: 03/04/1997

By Elizabeth Wise

JAPAN and Canada might be surprised to hear it, but American and European business leaders have stolen the famous name 'quad' for themselves.

Rather than applying it to the powerful, four-way trade group composed of the EU, the US, Canada and Japan, they use it to describe the increasingly linked group of European and American business and European and American government.

American business already has close ties with the US government, some say too close, but EU companies have not had similar access to the European Commission.

European executives participating in the Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD) say the exercise has improved liaison between business and Union headquarters.

“There is much more cooperation on the European side,” said TABD's European steering committee chairman Craig Burchell. “That has been a very good side effect of the TABD.”

EU participants in the dialogue say the pressure from European business leaders is helping American industry to lobby the US Congress more effectively “to open up and show where the world is going”.

For the past year or so, business leaders on both sides have been using the TABD to push policy-makers to move faster and farther towards reducing regulatory obstacles to trade.

For business, the key priority remains the completion of a Mutual Recognition Agreement (MRA) for the telecommunications, medical devices and pharmaceuticals sectors.

This would mean governments agreeing to accept the standards and testing procedures of the other signatories, allowing those industries to export more easily.

Work thus far on the MRA has been complicated, controversial and sensitive, not least because the American Food and Drug Administration has been dragging its feet on the initiative.

But things are looking up. During a TABD meeting in Washington in late February, the US government and the European Commission pledged to conclude their MRA negotiations by the spring, hinting that the EU-US summit scheduled for 28 May in The Hague would be an unofficial deadline for ending the talks.

If an agreement is struck, it will open a new horizon in relations between the two trading giants: one of mutual confidence in each other's administrations.

The MRA would not harmonise standards on both sides. Nor would it amount to approving US drugs for the European market. But it would mean Americans accepting that the way Europeans manufacture telephones, medical devices and pharmaceuticals is comparable to their own - just as EU member states had to accept each other's capacity to produce and test products in order to create the single market.

An MRA would help big business. But the TABD is also focusing on small business.

For thousands of small enterprises on both sides of the Atlantic, a new 'partnership mission' designed to encourage link-ups has borne some fruit.

Last month, 300 small companies from each side met in Detroit and took a first look at an electronic data bank that will keep them in touch.

Small and medium-sized enterprises produce 25&percent; of the US' gross domestic product and governments in Europe regard them as a rich source of new jobs.

In February, the TABD group launched into a new field: electronic commerce. The governments and the business executives agreed that in the areas of shopping via the Internet and other electronic trading, European and American manufacturers should not go their own separate ways.

“We do not want a US system and an EU system,” said one executive. “We cannot afford to duplicate each other's efforts and then to have to compete for clients in the rest of the world.”

Both the Commission and the US government have pledged to fulfil the promise made to business executives who gathered in Washington in February by Stuart Eizenstat, Clinton's former ambassador to the EU and now under-secretary for international trade, when he said: “The progress we have made so far is only the beginning.”