Unrivalled coverage of European trade policy
Friday, April 19, 2019
The Council’s negotiating directives to the European Commission aim to ease the way towards negotiations with the United States on elimination of tariffs on goods and on conformity assessment. But will they make life easier for transatlantic negotiators? Not really. Member states mainly made amendments to the mandate on elimination …
Europe’s efforts towards sustainable trade is a paradox. While it successfully works with sticks and carrots for sustainable fisheries, the EU imposes rules on biofuels that cannot be complied with, writes Hosuk Lee-Makiyama.
It’s been an eventful week, with the EU coming up with new initiatives vis-a-vis China, the European Parliament voting down the EU’s United States trade strategy, a beef deal with Washington, and negotiations going on with Indonesia and Mercosur to try and achieve a free trade agreement with them. In …
Palm oil growers have signalled they could take the European Union to the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement body over its new biofuels regulation. The EU is preparing a definitive version of a ‘delegated act’ pertaining to its new Renewable Energy Directive that sets the environmental criteria required for biofuels …
There’s been loads of trade love going on in the twittosphere this week…. Alas, trade is largely a loveless type of environment…. A former European Commission negotiator once said that trade negotiations are “as unsentimental as war”. He said this from his experience in office in the middle of the …
The EU is posing as the new champion of trade openness and guardian of the international rules-based order. But three recent trade initiatives show that Europeans are all-too eager to do the opposite of what they preach, writes Hosuk Lee-Makiyama.
The ongoing trade ‘negotiations’ between the European Union and the United States are a good opportunity to try to resolve old gripes that the US holds against the EU’s import regime. One of the irritants the European Commission has tried to defuse under the shadow of a US threat to …
CETA, the landmark trade agreement between the EU and Canada, holds established best practices for trade-accelerated climate action, Bernice Lee and Scott Vaughan argue as the business, civil society and policy communities gather in Brussels to consider how to merge trade and climate action.
The EU and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations announced plans yesterday to upgrade their relationship to a ‘strategic partnership’. But palm oil and human rights disagreements continue to put sand in the wheels of the bilateral cooperation machinery. Strategic partner status tends to mean little in practice. For the …
Insiders don’t believe the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement signed this summer faces a serious risk of being voted down in the European Parliament at the end of the year. But as the assembly enters its last months of functioning, a vocal group of left-of-centre MEPs is making a last big …
