The EU Needs a Bigger Playing Field – Not a Level Playing Field

Summary:

European policy-makers increasingly see the EU’s commitment to open markets as naïve. They are concerned about the constraints EU firms face when competing, in the EU or abroad, with businesses from the EU’s major trading and investment partners – especially, but not exclusively, China. To tackle this problem, the EU is developing instruments to unilaterally limit or regulate some foreign companies’ access to its market. For example, the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) would allow the European Commission to discipline firms which receive foreign subsidies that distort competition in the EU; and the International Procurement Instrument (IPI) could limit foreign companies’ ability to win EU public contracts unless EU firms have fair rights to bid for public contracts in the foreign company’s home country.

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