Report from the Commission to the European Council. Trade and investment barriers report 2013

In 2012, the Commission presented its second Trade and Investment Barriers Report (TIBR) to the European Council. The report, as the first one, implemented a mandate given in the Europe 2020 Strategy which was subsequently taken up in the Commission's Communication "Trade, Growth and World Affairs". This Communication committed to "produce from 2011 onwards an annual trade and investment barriers report for the Spring European Council as our key instrument to monitor trade barriers and protectionist measures and trigger appropriate enforcement action".

The report is meant to highlight a selection of key barriers faced by European Union (EU) companies, and more generally to raise awareness on the importance of addressing trade obstacles in such way that companies can fully reap the benefits of the global market in accordance not only with what has been negotiated with the EU's trading partners at the multilateral or bilateral level, but also with the commitments taken in other fora to foster free trade, e.g. in the context of G20 meetings.

In view of protracted economic stagnation in the EU, this third report is all the more important as a pillar of our market access strategy and as a complement to the EU's ambitious negotiating agenda. As pointed out in the Commission Staff Working Document on external sources of growth, the contribution of external demand to economic development is bound to increase in the future, as 90% of global economic growth is expected to be generated outside the EU by 2015. Moreover, due to the generalisation of interdependent regional and global supply chains, the EU must confirm its prominent role as a key value-provider on a global scale be it in manufacturing, R&D, design, logistics, etc. In order to fully consolidate this potential, stronger links with the new global centres of growth – that have been largely covered in the 2012 edition of the TIBR – are therefore crucial in ensuring sustainable economic recovery in the EU.

To this end, this third edition of the TIBR (2013) provides an account of the progress achieved on those barriers identified in previous editions of the TIBR (2011 and 2012) which continue to be of concern to EU exporters and could not be fully solved to date. Furthermore, the TIBR 2013 also highlights a number of new barriers which appeared in 2012 and deserve concerted action and political prioritisation both by the Commission and the Member States in certain key markets.

The focus of this report on some of the EU's strategic partners does obviously not mean that barriers in other markets should be neglected. On the contrary, the Commission is actively engaging with a far broader group of trading partners to improve market access conditions for EU companies still confronted with a considerable number of trade obstacles.

EUR-Lex: COM(2013)103: Follow the progress of this report through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2013:103:FIN

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