Insights

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Rules of origin in an EU-UK FTA: A ‘hidden hard Brexit’ for food and drink exporters?

Trade & Manufacturing

Stephen Adams
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The imposition of rules of origin on trade between the EU and the UK is often poorly understood as an important factor in managing the impact of a UK exit from the EU. While it is generally expected that the UK and the EU will ultimately trade with each other on a largely or completely tariff-free basis via a preferential trade agreement, accessing the preferential terms…

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Taking back control of EU trade policy

Trade & Manufacturing

Daniel Capparelli
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Yesterday, the European Council’s Trade Policy Committee gathered for an informal meeting in Tallinn to discuss how to approach the European Commission’s new trade package. The package essentially fleshed out some of the policy details of Commission President Jean Claude Junker’s vision for a more balanced and progressive EU trade policy, set out in his ‘state of the…

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Could the UK join NAFTA?

Trade & Manufacturing

Daniel Capparelli
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The question of UK membership of NAFTA seems to be doing the rounds again. This is not entirely surprising. Both Australian and Canadian trade officials – including Ottawa’s former chief NAFTA negotiator - have recently called for the UK to join existing trading blocks, such as NAFTA, as an easy fix to potential Brexit-related disruptions to UK trade and production…

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European policy and the future of the EU

General Policy

Stephen Adams
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Ten years of serial crises and rising voter scepticism about mainstream political parties have definitively buried the managerialist consensus that dominated EU policymaking in the early 2000s. The financial crisis, strained public finances and large-scale immigration flows have exposed the delicate balance between technical problem solving, solidarity of national…

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CETA: What’s the matter with Wallonia?

Trade & Manufacturing

Daniel Capparelli
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This has been a tricky week for EU trade policy. Up until last Friday, EU governments were largely expected to unanimously give their final greenlight in this week’s Council meeting for the signing and provisional implementation of CETA. However, this week the minister president of Belgium’s Wallonia Region Paul Magnette de facto ordered the Belgian federal government to…

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The future of UK trade policy: the case for regulatory diplomacy

Trade & Manufacturing

Stephen Adams
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It is widely accepted that services, and financial services in particular, are a key comparative advantage of the UK. A full quarter of UK services exports are financial or insurance services. This is an asset and a liability. Much of this financial services trade is potentially exposed to the impacts of Brexit, where the loss or roll-back of the EU passporting regime for…

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UK trade policy and Brexit

Trade & Manufacturing

Stephen Adams
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Among the many implications of a UK exit from the EU is a fundamental change to the way that the UK makes and implements trade policy. As part of the EU, the UK’s trade policy is effectively set by the EU’s common commercial policy. The UK shares a single external tariff regime with the EU – a corollary of the single market – and many of the key elements of its wider…

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Getting real about the UK’s post-Brexit trade policy options

Trade & Manufacturing

Daniel Capparelli
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Former UK Europe minister, David Davis was the latest UK politician to set out in print yesterday a post-Brexit manifesto for UK trade policy. In both substance and form, his vision is a synthesis of a range of proposals raised by the leave camp during the referendum campaign. It is hard to fault Davis for ambition. For any business with an interest in UK trade policy it…

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The ‘other NAFTA’

Trade & Manufacturing

Daniel Capparelli
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Mexican trade negotiators are in Brussels today for the first round of negotiations to upgrade the fifteen-year-old EU-Mexico FTA. The 2000 EU-Mexico agreement was one of the first ‘modern’ (translation: “we agreed to talk about services and investment”) FTAs the EU ever signed, and one of the very few FTAs it has ever managed to sign with one of the larger emerging…

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General Politics

The stakes for Brazil’s 180-day government

General Politics

Daniel Capparelli
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So Dilma Rousseff is gone, at least for now. Over the next 180 days, Vice President Michel Temer will set out an economic agenda focused on the consolidation of public accounts and on business-friendly market reforms, while Dilma’s impeachment trial continues. This begs the question of how much Temer can realistically hope to achieve in the 180 days he has in power. The…

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TDI redux: do two political problems make a political solution?

Trade & Manufacturing

Daniel Capparelli
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TDI redux. The EU’s trade defence instruments (TDI) reform package was officially put back on the agenda by the Dutch EU presidency today after having been shelved in 2014. However, this apparent new impetus behind TDI reform is not the result of a sudden new consensus on merits of the Commission’s 2013 proposal in itself – which died a slow and mangled death in Trialogue…

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China market economy: status update

Financial Services

Stephen Adams
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The debate has now started in earnest over whether the EU will – or must – award China ‘Market Economy Status’ (MES) in 2016. The status is politically sensitive for Beijing, but has no technical standing outside of EU nomenclature. However, it is linked to one very specific and narrow element of EU trade defence practice where the material impact for some businesses…

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Knowing when to quit: assessing the Nairobi WTO Ministerial

Trade & Manufacturing

Stephen Adams
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While the eyes of the world were fixed on Paris in December 2015 for the COP21 climate summit, the 10th WTO Ministerial was also taking place in Nairobi in Kenya. WTO Director General Roberto Azevêdo described the package of measures agreed at Nairobi as the most significant package of reforms in trade in agricultural goods ever agreed. This is a fair assessment, although…

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The new deals: the 2015 EU trade strategy

Trade & Manufacturing

Stephen Adams
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The European Commission last week published its new trade policy strategy, the most comprehensive restatement of EU trade policy since 2010. It is exceptionally ambitious – adding more FTAs to the already crowded stable of EU open and recently-concluded deals. It is also highly defensive in its attempt to win back political ground lost in the Transatlantic Trade and…

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ASEAN Insurance Markets: Integration, regulation and trade

Financial Services

Stephen Adams
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ASEAN has a justified reputation for moving slowly on formal commitments to regional economic integration. However our report makes it clear that the real picture is much more complex, and that regional ambitions are driving important changes in the insurance market. Attitudes to foreign capital are evolving, regulatory capacity is uneven but growing and the race to…

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ITA: The tech imports deal with lessons for global trade policy

TMT

Stephen Adams
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On 24 July, the WTO announced the conclusion of negotiations to update and expand the product coverage of the 1997 Information Technology Agreement (ITA). ITA II will eliminate tariffs for over 200 high-tech products – including new generation semiconductors, videogame consoles and global positioning system devices – traded between the 80 signatories of the original…

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