2024-04-18 04:56:40
Former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta is due to present his report on the internal market to the Twenty-Seven, meeting in Brussels, on Thursday April 18 in the morning. For eight months, he traveled across the European Union (EU), meeting all the European heads of state and government as well as representatives of businesses, civil society and intellectuals.
Does Jacques Delors’ “internal market”, to whom you dedicate this report, live up to expectations?
A minority of businesses and citizens in Europe – the most cosmopolitan, the most educated – benefit from the advantages of the internal market, while in the United States or China economic players invest their entire market. Take our SMEs: only 17% of them benefit from it. And there are only 3 million Europeans who work, within the Union, in a country other than their own. This weakness has repercussions on growth and explains part of the EU’s falling behind the United States and China.
So the Europeans are not investing enough in this large market?
They benefit very little from the effects of scale offered to them by the internal market. In three sectors in particular (energy, telecoms and financial markets), the internal market does not exist. When Jacques Delors created it, almost forty years ago, the member states wanted them to be excluded. Today, we are missing the train in these areas because of market fragmentation.
That’s to say ?
I am going to give you an example. A Chinese telecom operator today has, on average, 467 million customers, an American has 107 million and a European…, 5 million! There are more than 100 telecom operators in Europe, we have divided the market into twenty-seven, it is an industrial disaster.
How to remedy this state of affairs?
The domestic market is very XXe century. When it was designed, the great European countries were the great countries of the world. To continue with the example of telecoms, in the 1980s and 1990s, Europeans were at the forefront of innovation. Today, this is no longer the case. This is why, I think, we need to create a fifth freedom for research, innovation and skills, alongside the four freedoms of movement of goods, services, capital and people of the internal market .
What’s more, the rules on competition in these strategic sectors of telecoms, energy and financial markets must evolve: European antitrust must no longer rule based on the state of competition in a single EU countries, but on a continental scale.
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