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News

EU and US start regulatory co-operation

Published: Monday 13 February 2006 | Updated: Sunday 8 April 2007

The Commission hosted last month the first high-level EU-US Regulatory Cooperation Forum in Brussels. The initiative seeks to minimise trade barriers in the world's single largest bilateral trade relationship.

Background:

The EU-US economic relation is the biggest bilateral trade and investment relationship at global level. According to the Commission, mutual investment stands at €1.4 trillion with trade in goods and services totalling €600 billion each year.

The EU-US high-level regulatory forum aims at improving cooperation in order to overcome differences in regulation and minimise trade barriers.

The annual EU-US summit in Washington on 20 June 2005 developed the 2005 Roadmap for EU-US Regulatory Cooperation. It establishes a series of practical horizontal and sectoral activities:

Horizontal activities include an informal dialogue between the Commission and the US Office of Management and Budget to discuss regulatory practices, transparency provisions, public consultation and risk assessment methodologies.
Sectoral activities include more cooperation in several sectors such as pharmaceuticals, automobile safety or ICT.

The EU-US first informal economic ministerial meeting on 30 November 2005 followed up on the commitments made during the June summit and discussed transatlantic economic integration and shared economic challenges.

Other related news:

About 150 senior EU and US regulators, EU member states representatives, European Parliament and US Congress officials attended the first high-level meeting of the EU-US Regulatory Cooperation Forum on 26 January in Brussels.

Numerous non-governmental interested parties also attended the meeting, including the Trans-Atlantic Business and Consumer Dialogues (TABD and TACD).

The forum meeting offered an insight into "how we regulate" on both sides of the Atlantic and to review recent developments in EU and US regulatory environments. It also allowed stakeholders and regulators to identify priorities in reducing regulatory differences and thereby advancing transatlantic economic integration.

"We must now, on both sides, reflect more on what we have discussed as well as validate our ideas internally on what the next steps could be," an EU official said after the meeting. He said follow-up points might include:

how to link the horizontal and sectoral dialogues and "give teeth" to the overall effort;
review stakeholder suggestions, including on transparency and conflict resolution;
jointly analyse respective regulatory management systems, including the practices (US Circular A-4 and EC Guidelines) on impact assessments of draft regulations;
consider training opportunities for officials in better regulation issues, economics, environmental aspects, to take place at relevant universities;
consider jointly collecting and using data, given how costly and time consuming it is to gather data.

Positions:

Alfons Westgeest, Managing Partner at Kellen Europe, sees the initiative as "an important step forward in transatlantic economic relations. Better regulation in the EU could now be further enhanced by a transatlantic cooperation," he believes. "In the energy sector, Kellen is leading the secretariat of the technology platform for hydrogen and fuel cells, and we can imagine that such a Regulatory Forum might play a key role for this emerging sector".

Next steps:

The next forum will take place in Washington D.C later this spring and will try to identify new prospective areas for cooperation. The EU and US plan further events during the year.