EU Single Market: How can we make it priority number one again?

What are the main challenges in the EU Single Market? What's needed to revive it? Six major EU business associations – BusinessEurope, DigitalEurope, Eurochambres, EuroCommerce, ERT and SMEunited - joined forces to organise an event in Brussels to discuss these questions.

We were happy to welcome former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, responsible for a High-Level Report on Single Market to be presented at the March 2024 European Summit in Brussels. “This report, we hope, will focus on the removal of barriers to intra-EU trade and investment. Any additional regulation should guarantee the freedom to trade and invest across borders, without exceptions”, said our Director General Markus J. Beyrer at the event.

Letta raised the question of how to relaunch political interest towards the Single Market. He specified that there is noticeable Single Market fatigue. It is not easy to mobilise political energy to support and revive the Single Market, but it is also necessary to relaunch a high-level discussion across Europe.

Speakers highlighted the Single Market's pivotal role in enhancing Europe's economic power amidst geopolitical shifts and showed concerns about fragmentation due to crisis-related exemptions and excessive regulation. To contribute to this debate, on 28 November BusinessEurope published our recommendations on the future of the EU Single Market: How to reignite the engine of Europe's global economic leadership.