Tag: regulatory cooperation

Picture that intends to showcase talks between regulators.

Making ‘open trade’ and the global market work for EU consumers

“Open trade must go hand in hand with open policy making,” Jean-Claude Juncker said in his annual State of the Union speech last week. With this statement he kicked-off changes in the way the European Commission conducts trade negotiations. His...

and / September 20, 2017

EU-US consumer groups want to change trade deals: split ‘tariffs’ from ‘rules’

If you work in policy communications, you’ll be familiar with the amount of technical terms and acronyms that come with conferences full of experts. You’ll know how difficult it can be to make things understandable and to cut out the...

/ April 5, 2017

Whipping up a transatlantic trade agreement? Shop wisely.

The EU and US negotiators of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) meet in New York this week for the 13th round of negotiations. In the media storm that accompanies TTIP it is not easy to keep a bird’s-eye...

/ April 25, 2016

Will regulatory cooperation in TTIP become a straight-jacket for EU law making?

Regulatory cooperation might sound like a relatively benign and straightforward part of trade agreements. It is actually at the very core of TTIP, a trade deal being negotiated between the US and the EU which would be the world’s largest....

/ March 21, 2016

Lessons to learn from TPP: What the EU shouldn’t do in TTIP

What is TPP? TPP stands for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and it is the most important free trade agreement ever negotiated. It covers a vast number of sectors and involves 12 countries in the Pacific[1] region, including the United States (US)....

/ December 1, 2015

Why reassurances that TTIP will not affect the right to regulate miss the point

At a recent debate on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), advocates for TTIP once again repeated the mantra that nothing in TTIP, not even the section on regulatory cooperation, will affect the right of the parties (the EU,...

/ September 29, 2015

Who is going to pay the bill for regulatory cooperation in TTIP?

Ever since I read the European Commission’s proposal on regulatory cooperation I have been trying to figure out how this system will work in practice. One thing which intrigued me was the price tag for engaging in this kind of...

/ July 24, 2015

What kind of TTIP does the European Parliament want?

After almost two years of negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal, Members of the European Parliament are now assessing progress and will make recommendations to the negotiators. Those recommendations should not be taken lightly because they will...

/ May 7, 2015

“TTIP won’t lower standards” – Well then let’s break down how – UPDATE

Update: 11 September 2015 In this blog, I urged EU policy-makers to give us strong and tangible reassurances that TTIP wouldn’t lower standards. Well, they need to do a better job. The peace of the Brussels’ summer was indeed troubled...

/ April 23, 2015

Regulatory cooperation: perhaps boring, but the TTIP storm on the horizon

Disclaimer: This analysis is based on the leaked version of the regulatory cooperation proposal. We will soon provide further analysis based on the textual proposal published by the Commission. Regulatory cooperation is on the face of it one of the least exciting...

/ February 3, 2015