News and analysis on trade policy in Europe
Thursday, May 1, 2025
The first EU ASEAN summit, gathering heads of state and government from the ten South East Asian Nations and the twenty seven EU member states plus the head of the Council and the European Commission was mainly a very symbol-laden act that cements recent efforts at greater political rapprochement between …
Panellists in the dispute settlement cases brought by China, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey in an almost coordinated fashion after 2018 could no longer delay the publication of perhaps the politically most salient case in the World Trade Organization’s twenty-seven year history: the United States Section 232 steel and aluminium tariffs. …
Chile and the European Union sealed a long-awaited package to upgrade a twenty-year old Association Agreement. The deal is a strategic move for the EU in its quest for greater critical raw materials security. For Chile the announcement of the agreement comes as its political institutions are finalising their ratification …
The usually low-key, technocratic Export Control Forum, a big bash organised by the European Commission with allies and business and civil society stakeholders each year in Brussels was unusually well attended this time round. It reveals the new salience of the EU’s export control regime in times of war on …
A bit of sarcasm can’t do any harm, right?
The amount of energy going into the EU US Trade and Technology Council in the Brussels bubble is astounding. It’s at times as if nothing else counted: everyone is obsessed with it. Will the TTC have delivered more on what happened outside its formal framework than within?
Nobody will have missed the news of European Council president Charles Michel’s solo trip to China on Thursday. The trip revealed the EU’s entrenched internal rifts over China. It can be read as the post-pandemic restart of a very difficult domestic European conversation about China.
Germany is the first among the ‘big’ EU member states to be on track to ratify the trade agreement with Canada commonly known as CETA. The country’s parliament’s ratification approval today comes after years of domestic debate and many misgivings in Germany about the trade agreement – in particular its …
The EU won single-handedly its legal case brought against Indonesia’s export ban on nickel in a panel ruling released today. But Indonesia is expected to ignore the ruling and appeal the case to a non-existing appellate body at the WTO in Geneva.
It’s been long in coming, but the EU Republic of Korea Digital Partnership was finally announced today at a bilateral leaders’ meeting between European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Korea’s president Yoon Suk Yeol.
