Tag: regulatory cooperation
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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)....
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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“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...
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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...