News and analysis on trade policy in Europe
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
This week’s top focus in EU trade policy will be Asia. Brussels is hosting the Asia Europe Meeting on Thursday and Friday. ASEM has a very broad membership and lose structure and is mostly seen as a meeting, mingling and talking shop. But in the era of Trump the gathering …
The trade agenda was extremely dense this week. The EU is preparing to sign and ratify a slew of trade deals. The European Commission is close to getting a mandate from member states to renegotiate a beef quota with the US as part of a package of possible deals under …
President Donald Trump said he pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership because it was a “horrible deal” that stole American jobs while benefiting big corporations. But Washington’s new agreement with Mexico and Canada, the USMCA, has incorporated many elements from TPP (reborn as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement …
New Zealand FTA round 2 This week the EU and New Zealand are holding their second round of free trade agreement negotiations Down Under. The talks were kick-started in July and appear to be on a fast lane as the parties aim to work on text-based negotiations pretty swiftly. Please …
This week has been heavy on World Trade Organization issues (EU’s WTO reform pitch, services domestic regulation talks, US engagement with WTO reforms), the fallout from the new NAFTA,with bits on what’s happening (not) on Britain’s fabulous post- Brexit trade deals. Member states met in Innsbruck today – and there …
Washington’s insistence that the World Trade Organization must be modernised before it gets behind proposals to fill Appellate Body vacancies begs the question: Why hasn’t the US come up with its own proposals to reform the Geneva-based trade body? The Trump administration said in its February Trade Policy Agenda that …
Emily Rees assesses the impact of this Sunday’s Brazilian presidential election on European investments in Latin America’s largest economy and what sort of role the new administration will likely play in helping to secure a trade agreement with the EU. In an exceedingly polarised political climate, Brazilians are expected to …
There will be little this week in terms of formal EU FTA negotiation rounds nor intense legislative activity: much more in the coming weeks! Lots of internal wrangling, of course, not least at the informal meeting of trade ministers in Innsbruck, Austria, on Friday. Hot topics of the moment: investment …
Below some highlights of this week’s trade committee meeting in Brussels, and a little update on the EU-Australia FTA talks. In case you missed them, check out our other articles this week on no-deal Brexit here and here, the EU’s food export bonanza, trilateral EU-Japan-US discussions on China and WTO, CETA, and the …
Donald Trump signed his first major trade deal on Monday, an update to the US pact with Korea that the president called a “very big deal” that is “very, very good for American farmers”. More sober assessments are that the revisions to the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement are modest and …
