Boosting productivity through a more integrated Single Market

Key points

The EESC:

• believes that single market integration must become a political priority backed by measurable targets and timelines, and not only a policy objective, since a fully functioning single market has the potential to be the most powerful driver of productivity in Europe;
• notes that a key structural weakness of the EU economy is the difficulty firms have in scaling across borders, due to regulatory fragmentation, diverging standards and administrative burdens;
• highlights that, while single market integration should cover both goods and services, the integration of the services market remains one of the largest untapped sources of productivity gains in the EU;
• notes that unilateral national industrial policies pose risks to the single market and this fragmentation undermines Europe’s ability to compete globally, weakening the effectiveness of industrial policy itself;
• underlines the need to work towards developing a Savings and Investment Union that provides diverse funding options for businesses, especially for high-risk, innovative enterprises;
• calls for a systematic approach to regulatory simplification, including ‘once-only’ reporting and reduced compliance burdens to facilitate intra-EU trade, provided that cutting provisions are truly superfluous;
• is of the view that progress in single market integration should be monitored through clear performance indicators and benchmarking measures, with action lines fully integrated into the European Semester framework.