European Commission to defend openness to import in Oct review
19 Sep '06
3 min read
Internationally, our businesses perform strongly in countries where demand is static. But in rapidly growing regions, particularly in Asia, we are underperforming.
He argued: "We must keep the WTO as the fundamental platform on which to build global liberalisation. There will be no European retreat from multilateralism.
But we should also go beyond the EU's existing bilateral free trade agreements, by setting out the case for new free trade agreements designed to deliver more open markets and fairer trading conditions in new areas of growth, particularly in Asia".
He stressed that FTAs can build on WTO multilateral liberalisation by addressing areas such as trade in services, public procurement markets, competition policy and regulatory harmonisation that are relate directly to key EU trading strengths but are not yet fully addressed by WTO rules or standards.
He also said that the EU would set out new initiatives on the better protection of intellectual property rights, review and possible reform of the European Unions trade defence instruments such as anti-dumping and a detailed reassessment of the European Union's trade strategy with China.
The Global Europe strategy paper will be adopted by the European Commission on October 4, 2006.
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