EU policymakers should prioritise integrating the Single Market rather than establishing trade barriers to ensure small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) thrive, says German stainless steel trader Gerber Group.
As EU leaders met at Alden Biesen on Thursday, Gerber warned that tackling rising costs, expanding bureaucracy, and an “increasingly dysfunctional” Single Market are key to solving Europe’s competitiveness problem, rather than trade protection. “Non-tariff barriers, regulatory fragmentation, and administrative requirements now function effectively as internal tariffs ranging from 65-100%,” the firm tells Kallanish.
“The European Single Market is stagnating while prices and production costs continue to rise. Protective instruments such as tariffs, quotas, or origin requirements increase the cost of European value creation instead of safeguarding it,” with additional costs passed on to consumers, says chief executive Thorsten Gerber.
Unlike large corporations, SMEs are unable to absorb rising costs or relocate production internationally. Trade barriers exacerbate existing imbalances within the EU, a Single Market composed of highly diverse economies, the firm notes.
It suggests policymakers implement no new trade barriers without an integrated overall impact assessment, remove protection measures that exclusively benefit large industries, and prioritise eliminating internal market barriers.
Also required are mandatory SME impact checks for new and planned initiatives, a measurable reduction of bureaucracy as a competitiveness objective, and for trade policy to be a complement to, not substitute for, a functioning Single Market, Gerber concludes.
