| 摘要 | Executive Summary
In the United States, tech startups have immediate access to hundreds of millions of potential customers—not so in Europe, where regulation of digital and nondigital industries differs substantially across individual countries.
The most prominent attempt to harmonize national laws that regulate digital businesses and markets for digital products and services across Europe is the Digital Single Market (DSM), an initiative of the current European Commission. While not misguided in spirit, the DSM is unlikely to solve the systemic problems with the European Single Market unless it is combined with reforms that address regulatory heterogeneity in the EU’s nondigital goods and services sectors. Advertising the DSM as the EU’s flagship initiative creates the risk that EU citizens and political leaders will lose sight of the fragmentary nature of the EU’s nondigital markets.
To become a tech powerhouse, the EU has a long way to go in deepening the European Single Market, especially across conventional, nondigital sectors. European institutions must make the case to European citizens and policymakers for regulatory cooperation and setting evidence-based standards, including regulatory cooperation arrangements under the umbrellas of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement and other EU trade agreements.
Read the PDF. Introduction
Policymakers in Europe tend to be confused about policies that would allow European economies to grow at pre-crisis rates. Some call for an end of fiscal austerity. Others call for deregulation. A small number advocate deeper economic integration under the auspices of the EU’s Single Market. Since the current European Commission led by Jean-Claude Juncker took office in November 2014, it has made creation of a genuine Digital Single Market (DSM) in the EU a priority. The Commission and the European Parliament identified digital technologies and digital business models as crucial to Europe’s internal and international competitiveness. Accordingly, the EU’s DSM strategy, adopted in May 2015, sets out 16 initiatives to address three overarching objectives:
To create better access for consumers and businesses to digital goods and services across Europe,
To put in place the right conditions and a level playing field for digital networks and innovative services to flourish, and
To maximize the growth potential of the digital economy.
To strengthen Europe’s digital economy, EU lawmakers currently focus almost exclusively on barriers explicitly enumerated by the DSM strategy, including policies to stimulate investment in high-speed internet infrastructure, measures against “unjustified” cross-border geo-blocking, and policies to harmonize national data privacy and consumer protection legislation.
Each of these legislative initiatives should be judged on its own merits. Although the EU is generally moving in the right direction in seeking a greater harmony of national laws that regulate digital businesses, its policy priorities are on the wrong territory. The remedies proposed by EU’s Digital Agenda will not cure the EU’s structural Single Market disease.
This is because the EU’s most pressing structural impediment to digital businesses developing and scaling up is the regulatory heterogeneity in nondigital industries. Due to fragmented regulatory frameworks for many goods and most services sectors, it will remain difficult for any digital business to contest traditional industries by digitalizing old-economy business models and to grow by expanding across national EU borders.
The EU’s exclusive focus on digital barriers has created another problem. The promotion of politically easy-to-sell digital policies distracts public attention away from the fragmentary nature of the EU’s Single Market. It also creates the risk that European citizens and, thus, political leaders will lose sight of the merits of harmonized, nondiscriminatory rules that foster competition, contestable markets, and economic development across and beyond the EU.
The backlash against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement between the EU and the United States, which is meant to include a modern and comprehensive chapter on good (evidence-based) practices of regulatory cooperation, can be attributed to EU institutions’ and most member state governments’ failure (or lack of willingness) to convincingly communicate the consequences of legal fragmentation and discriminatory national laws existing in the EU. Far too often, the EU’s free trade agreements as well as the EU Single Market integration were sold exclusively on the back of simplistic narratives about economic growth and job creation, which ignored the underlying mechanisms at work.
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Appendix A: European Commission Legislative Proposals (online only) |
