News and analysis on trade policy in Europe
Saturday, May 10, 2025
Negotiations to modernise the almost 20-year-old trade agreement between the EU and Mexico have intensified despite a missed December 2017 deadline set by EU negotiators to announce a political deal. Here’s the state of play. Mexico and the EU are clearly committed to clinching an agreement. Progress and goodwill …
EU member states are gradually accepting to exercise greater transparency in their joint trade policy making. The Council today released the negotiating mandate it gave the European Commission towards the modernisation of the 2002 EU-Chile Association Agreement, a very early move by member-state standards. The mandate itself reveals high EU …
Trade policy isn’t the most prominent priority of Bulgaria, the Balkan country in charge of presiding the six-month rotating presidency of the European Council. Sofia has put the onus on youth, security, digital and connectivity in the Western Balkans. Trade elicits only a few very general paragraphs in Sofia’s 16-page …
It will be a busy week on the trade front this week, with the European Parliament’s trade committee set to vote on the reform on the EU’s trade-defence instruments and the World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos, Switzerland – including a World Trade Organization ‘mini-ministerial’ on the sidelines of the …
This week in EU trade was marked by a first substantive round of trade negotiations with Chile, as well as a meeting of the EU Korea trade committee dominated by EU recriminations against Korean beef import restrictions and one of its labour union laws. Otherwise it’s been report and data …
There were plenty of trade stories from around the world this week, including efforts by China’s president to ease strained ties with the US, a request for Washington to probe the security risks of uranium imports, India’s plan to hold a mini-ministerial meeting, Australia’s trade challenge of Canadian measures on …
The European Parliament endorsed by a majority of 571 votes a report adopted by the international trade committee last November on an ongoing overhaul of the EU’s export control legislation. The EU’s regime will move away from focusing exclusively on non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It will be …
The centre-left S&D group, led by the chairman of the international trade committee, Bernd Lange, is in a renewed push for the EU to make the labour and environment provisions in its free trade agreements more enforceable, namely through potential commercial sanctions. The European Commission continues to resist, but is …
The EU and Chile are launching formal talks to upgrade their 2002 Association Agreement this week in Santiago. For both parties, the initiative has greater ‘geostrategic’ than actual economic significance, although for Chile in particular, economics also matter. Diversification and geostrategy Chile is traditionally the leading free …
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party CDU and her Bavarian counterpart, the CSU, reached an initial agreement on broad principles with the Social Democratic SPD party late last week aimed at forming a government following elections in September 2017. The 28-page document, which ends several weeks of scoping …
