Report on trade and investment barriers, 1 January 2019 – 31 December 2019

Summary:

Report published by the European Commission on 15 June 2020, which identifies the barriers encountered by European companies in foreign markets in 2019.

Further information:

The 10th edition of the Trade and Investment Barriers Report analyses the new barriers faced by business from European Union (EU) in 2019 and those removed for our companies in the same year thanks to the EU Market Access Partnership. This Partnership identifies barriers that EU firms face in third countries, defines a common strategy to remove them, and follows this strategy through.

This year’s edition includes a more granular analysis of which type of barriers causes the most problems to companies, and a specific focus on the sector that has seen the best results, agrifood. The Reports highlights a number of trends:

• Rise in the number of barriers, the multiplication of types of barriers involved and the increasing difficulty of removing many of them, which points to a paradigm where protectionism has become deeply ingrained in structural trade relations;
• Barriers have increasingly affected sectors linked to the EU's technological sovereignty and strategic autonomy;
• Increasingly challenging to tackle barriers in the industrial and service sectors;
• Protectionist measures spreading across specific regions.

Official

European Commission: DG Trade: Report on trade and investment barriers, 1 January 2019 - 31 December 2019 https://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2020/june/tradoc_158789.pdf

European Commission: Press Release, 18/06/2020: Trade Barriers Report: EU continues to open up markets outside Europe in midst of rising protectionism https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_1116

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