Europe’s costliest tariffs are self-imposed
The European Commission’s annual single market report delivers an uncomfortable truth: intra-EU trade fell from 23.5 per cent of bloc GDP in 2023 to 22 per cent in 2024. It is the first such decline outside a pandemic since 2016. Christine Lagarde warns that internal barriers amount to an effective tariff of 65 per cent
on goods and 100 per cent on services, far exceeding anything Donald Trump has threatened. The friction shows up in logistics. Cabotage limits, cooling-off periods and return-to-base rules under the EU’s Mobility Package were designed to protect drivers. They also send empty trucks across borders, waste fuel and raise costs. Freight forwarders maintain parallel compliance systems for 27 member states. Such costs never appear on tariff schedules, yet they erode margins daily. The real problem is member states piling national requirements on top of EU law until the single market breaks into 27 separate regimes. The remedies are known: rules that apply identically everywhere, and a single European code companies can opt into rather than juggling 27 variants.
Source: Oliver Link, DVZ (Extract from Commentary)
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