Bandwagon or Barriers? The Role of Standards in the European and American Marketplace. Working Paper #1, November 1997

Industrial Standards - a highly technical and even obscure topic to many scholars and policy-makers - are crucial in shaping market access and conditions. They act as non-tariff barriers (NTBs) and may affect relations between governments and businesses. The paper examines the evolution of EU policy toward standards and evaluates recent efforts to foster greater cooperation between the EU and the US in reducing trade inhibiting of industrial standards

For President Trump, tearing up trade agreements may be easier said than done.

During the campaign, Donald Trump signaled that he would make major changes to US trade policy as president, including renegotiating major existing agreements like NAFTA. Ahead of Trump’s inauguration, Michelle Egan writes that Congress has given the presidency major powers to negotiate trade agreements, meaning that President Trump will be able to change or walk away from existing agreements with relative ease. Though he may face little opposition at home, Trump’s efforts may spark disputes from trade partner countries, disrupt supply chains, and exacerbate inter-agency rivalries at home

TTIP’s Hard Core: Technical barriers to trade and standards. Paper No. 13 in the CEPS-CTR project ‘TTIP in the Balance’ and CEPS Special Report No. 117/August 2015

Michelle Egan and Jacques Pelkmans provide an overview of the TBT chapter in TTIP and the various issues between the US and the EU in this area, which in turn requires extensive expositions of domestic regulation in the US and the EU. TBTs, outside heavily regulated sectors such as chemicals, automobiles or medicines (which have separate chapters in TTIP), can be caused by divergent (voluntary) standards, technical regulations and conformity assessment. Indeed, in all three the US and the EU have long experienced frictions with considerable trading costs. The 1998 Mutual Recognition Agreement about conformity assessment only succeeded in two out of six sectors. The US and European standardisation traditions differ and this paper explains why it is so hard, also economically, to realise convergence. However, the authors reject the unproductive ‘stand-off’ between US and EU negotiators on standardisation and suggest to clarify the enormous economic ‘installed base’ of prominent US standards in the world economy and build a solution from there. As to technical regulation, the prospect of converging regulation (via harmonisation) is often dim, but equivalence (given similar levels of regulatory protection) can be an option

Tackling barriers to trade in the Single Market. ACES Cases No. 2014.2

This paper focuses on the challenges operating in the single market due to continued persistence of regulatory barriers to trade, despite being considered one of the most integrated and successful areas of market integration. We use a unique data set on infringements to the free movement of goods to assess the types of barriers that firms encounter, their impact and variation across states and sectors, and their resolution method - through Court decisions or the pre-litigation, administrative means available within the infringement proceedings mechanism to restore compliance. We also resort to the Solvit dataset provided to the authors by the Commission to analyse some features and the effectiveness of this informal mechanism in dealing with discriminatory domestic trade and regulatory practices. We examine four key questions: What are the most problematic policy areas in terms of barriers to trade that undermine the single market? What different dispute resolution mechanisms are utilized to address trade barriers and thus improve the functioning of the single market? Under what conditions are different enforcement mechanisms and strategies more likely to be used to resolve barriers for businesses operating in the single market? How important and effective are the more informal strategies in improving market access? In doing so, our goal is to link the research on trade barriers to that of implementation and compliance to assess the diverse strategies undertaken to reduce regulatory barriers to trade

The Values-Based Trade Agenda

With the increasing trade tensions between the United States and China, pressures created by Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic, most trade scholars have focused on rising protectionism exhibited through defensive strategies such as tariffs and export controls. However, this focus ignores the fundamental shift in international trade goals of the United States and the European Union towards a values-based trade agenda. Instead of merely focusing on free trade based on efficiency and market access, trade regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have independently pursued measures designed to address environmental sustainability and social equity. These policies resonate with their domestic constituencies and allows them to promote their values along global supply chains. These values-based agendas, however, are likely to create new trade conflicts rather than partnerships. This is due in part to the fact that the transatlantic trade relationship remains embedded in international regulatory frameworks predominantly focused on efficiency gains and cutting red tape to ease the flow of products and services. Through two comparative case studies on cosmetics and medical devices, we highlight how the promotion of competitive liberalization in transatlantic trade has not generated the promised harmonization result. Instead, it has created social and environmental inequities. The case studies point out that to incorporate social and environmental equity adjustments for vulnerable and marginalized communities, trade regulators, negotiators, and lawyers alike ought to assess the ex-ante distributive effects in regulatory cooperation and the ex-post enforcement tools of regulation of their valuesbased trade agenda

EU Single Market(s) after Brexit

This article focuses on the European single market, which has been one of the central issues in terms of the impacts of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. As the aim of the single market project is to open the internal borders of the EU to the free movement of goods, services, capital, and labor to create cross-jurisdictional markets, the economic and political effects of Brexit will be widespread, if not yet fully understood, outside the British polity. The article looks at the current state of the single market, then highlights the impact of British withdrawal on economic governance, focusing on different market freedoms, given the degree of trade interdependence and integrated supply chains that have evolved in response to changes in goods and services. One of the lessons from Brexit negotiations is the importance of distinguishing between different single market(s) when assessing the impact of British ‘exit’ on member states. The concluding section focuses on the political safeguards of market integration to manage the relationship between the UK and EU, to illustrate how judicial, market, and institutional safeguards create options and constraints in mitigating the effects of ‘exit’

Effects of a Long Chain n-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acid-rich Multi-ingredient Nutrition Supplement on Body Composition and Physical Function in Older Adults with Low Skeletal Muscle Mass.

Six months of supplementation with a multi-ingredient nutrition supplement was investigated in older adults with low skeletal muscle mass given the recently purported benefits of such approaches. Community-dwelling older adults (age, 74.9 ± 3.6 y; M/F, 18/19) participated in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial involving daily consumption of either fruit juice placebo (PLA) or supplement (SUPP) in the form of a 200-mL carton of a juice-based emulsion of long chain n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC n-3 PUFA) (3000 mg as 1500 mg docosahexaenoic acid and 1500 mg eicosapentaenoic acid), whey protein isolate (8 g), vitamin D3 (400 IU), and resveratrol (150 mg). Body composition, physical function, and circulating markers of metabolic health were assessed at baseline (PRE), and after 3 (MID) and 6 (POST) months of supplementation. Lean body mass (LBM) was unchanged in either group, but fat mass increased in SUPP by 1.41 (0.75, 2.07) kg at POST (+6.4%