News and analysis on trade policy in Europe
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
This week it’s Brussels’ Bruegel that isn’t pulling any punches on critical EU policies on Russian gas and net-zero technologies. The Institute for European Environmental Policy is proposing ways to implement the new EU sustainability due diligence regulations in countries such as Vietnam.
The EU and Japan vowed to finalise ongoing bilateral negotiations on data flows as part of their bilateral trade agreement known as EPA and to facilitate the conclusion of plurilateral negotiations on an agreement on e-commerce in the World Trade Organization. They also adopted ‘digital principles’ that will guide their …
The European Commission will not stop applying its import safeguard on steel just this year, despite having investigated the matter. Instead, the overall volume that is allowed into the EU market under the steel safeguard will increase by 4% next month – and a slew of country-specific quotas for developing …
This week’s think tank publication highlights include another set of new pieces by the European Council on Foreign Relations and a think piece from the Peterson Economics for International Trade.
Like so many other European Commission ‘communications’, the economic security strategy is mainly a means to spell out and join up already existing economic policies the EU has adopted to respond to growing global geopolitical turbulence. So what’s new about the new document unveiled today?
Plans by Japan and China to go to arbitration under the alternative appeals mechanism MPIA in the World Trade Organization, announced last March, were quietly shelved as the panel report on a steel anti-dumping case brought by Tokyo was simply published on Monday.
So the media were alerted last night. The move came – seemingly – out of the blue: the European Commission is getting ready to launch an anti-dumping case against electric vehicles imported from China. Boom! Scoop! The digestive systems of some media are simple: they spew out very quickly what …
The European Commission released the draft negotiating mandate it is seeking from EU member states to formally start negotiations with the United States on a critical minerals trade agreement.
Think tanks in Europe this week have been busy scrutinising the EU’s recently very active subsidy-industrial policy nexus.
It’s that time of the year when the OECD, the ‘rich-world think tank’ and occasional international treaty negotiation forum hosts its ministers in Paris. Overarching themes this year: supply chain resilience, sustainability, trade multilateralism Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific.
