European Community's Internal Market Research Articles

The perspective of 1992/93 and Greek agriculture

This article assesses the impact on Greek agriculture of the 1992/93 completion of the European Community's internal market. The Greek farm sector's experience of membership is reviewed around four themes: transfers; market access; production, prices and incomes; and structures. The possible effects of further economic integration are then examined in terms of these four themes. It is concluded that the main impact would be upon the sector's structural weaknesses and opportunities for the development of the country's ‘less favoured’ regions.

Multilateralism Matters: The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form

Part 1 THE CONCEPT: John Gerard Ruggie, Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution. Part 2 THEORETICAL DEBATES: James A. Caporaso, International Relations Theory and Multilateralism: The Search for Foundations Lisa L. Martin, The Rational State Choice of Multilateralism. Part 3. DOMESTIC CONTENT: Anne-Marie Burley, Regulating the World: Multilateralism, International Law, and the Projection of the New Deal Regulatory State Peter F. Cowhey, Elect Locally-Order Globally: Domestic Politics and Multilateral Co-operation, Judith Goldstein Creating the GATT Rules: Politics, Institutions, and American Policy Steve Weber, Shaping the Post-war Balance of Power: Multilateralism in NATO. Part 4. INTERNATIONAL CHANGE: Miles Kahler, Multilateralism with Small and Large Numbers Patrick M. Morgan, Multilateralism and Security: Prospects in Europe Geoffrey Garrett, International Co-operation and Institutional Choice: The European Community's Internal Market Mark W. Zacher, Multilateral Organizations and the Institution of Multilateralism: The Development of Regimes for Non-Terrestrial Spaces. Part 5 THEORETICAL REPRISE: Friedrich Kratochwil, Norms Versus Numbers: Multilateralism and the Rationalist and Reflexivist Approaches to Institutions - A Unilateral Plea for Communicative Rationality.

International cooperation and institutional choice: the European Community's internal market

The decision of the European Community (EC) members to complete their “internal market” by the end of 1992, as embodied in the 1987 Single European Act (SEA), may represent the most ambitious instance of multilateral cooperation since the construction of the post-World War II international order. The economic objective of internal market completion is the removal of a wide array of nontariff barriers to trade that elsewhere have proved politically intractable, including border controls, national standards, preferential procurement policies, and industrial subsidies. The institutional structures underpinning the internal market are more constraining on the behavior of sovereign states than has been the case for other international regimes. The SEA replaced unanimity voting (national vetoes) in the primary decision-making body of the EC, the Council of Ministers, with a system of majority voting over matters pertaining to the internal market. In addition, the internal market is buttressed by an elaborate and powerful legal system. EC law is considered to have supremacy over national laws and to have “direct effect” in domestic jurisdictions, regardless of whether it is explicitly incorporated through legislation.

EC 1992 from a North American Perspective

Completion of the European Community's internal market will force important changes in the economies of member countries, and the effects of those changes will spill over into the rest of the world. Within the EC, the prevailing view has been steadfast in the expectation that the benefits of further integration will exceed the costs. This has been especially the case among European businessmen, who have been in the lead in this phase of economic integration.1 As the target date of I992 draws closer, however, the level of anxiety, especially about the costs of adjustment, appears to be rising in some sectors and some 2 countries. Attitudes in non-member countries, in both private and official circles, have varied. The initial response from the executive branch in the United States was favourable. There has, however, been considerable fear among U.S. business and labour leaders that completion of the internal market would be accompanied by a conversion of Europe into an economic 'fortress' with sharply reduced access to foreigners. In some European non-member countries - notably Austria and Sweden - the prevailing view favours membership. The insider-outside issue is still being debated in Switzerland and elsewhere and is likely to play a role in the trade strategies of a number of Eastern European countries. In North America, the United States has entered into a free trade agreement with Canada and is poised for negotiations with Mexico. Some have suggested that American interest in regional trading pacts has been motivated in part at least by a strategic desire to strengthen the United States' bargaining hand with the EC. While regionalism thus thrives, the trade talks of the Uruguay Round lie moribund. If completed as planned, the current process of economic integration in Europe will replace a group of national markets, segmented in various degrees by a proliferation of non-tariff barriers, with a single regional market. If plans for monetary integration also reach fruition, they will replace a system of multiple currency areas with a single regional currency domain. From the perspective of the outsider, there are three broad areas of concern about the external effects of the ongoing process of real and monetary integration in Europe. The first, which is discussed in Section II, deals with the implications of goods and resource market integration for outside industries and firms and for outside welfare generally. This includes the direct effects of internal liberalisation and the effects of possible changes in the level of

Negotiating the Single European Act: national interests and conventional statecraft in the European Community

The unexpected approval in 1986 of the Single European Act and its program for completing the European Community's internal market by 1992 did not, according to the historical data presented in this article, result from an elite alliance of the European Community Commission, European Parliament, and pan-European business groups. Instead, it rested on interstate bargains involving Britain, France, and Germany, for which the two essential preconditions were the convergence of European economic policy prescriptions following the French turnaround in 1983 and the bargaining leverage that France and Germany gained by threatening to create a “two-track” Europe and exclude Britain. This suggests that theories stressing supranational factors, including certain variants of neofunctionalism, should be supplanted by an “intergovernmental institutionalise” approach combining a realist emphasis on state power and national interests with a proper appreciation of the important role of domestic factors in determining the goals that governments pursue.

The Effects of the Single Market on the Pattern of Japanese Investment

The completion of the European Community's internal market will be achieved through the removal of a host of non-tariff barriers to trade and the mobility of factors of production and the liberalisation of the conditions for the provision of service activities inside the single market. This completion of the European Community's internal market will enhance the locational advantages of European markets.

The European Internal Market Challenge and the Role of Microeconomic Analysis

This paper shows the role of the theories of imperfect competition and industrial organization for analyzing the channels through which the removal of the European Community's internal market barriers may result in economic gains, and for designing sensible accompanying policies. Some of the recent microeconomic research that provides a better framework for understanding the 1992 challenge than the one assumed in tradi tional trade theory are first presented. Then the main characteris tics of corporate strategies in the internal European market are investigated. Finally two microeconomic policies intended to influence the allocative and the distributive effects of the integra tion process are discussed. Le defi du marche interieur europeen et le role de I'analyse microeconomique