TTIP by Ferdi De Ville & Gabriel Siles-Brügge

Author:Ferdi De Ville & Gabriel Siles-Brügge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509501052
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-10-22T08:25:03+00:00

Notes

1. An important issue that we cannot discuss at sufficient length in this book is how liberalisation strengthens the position of employers, investors and shareholders. This is because it allows them more credibly to threaten trade unions and governments with relocating their investments (increasing their ‘exit option’) if proposed wage and labour agreements, taxes or regulations raise their costs of doing business and hence lower their profitability. In this way, ‘negative’ integration (the removal of barriers to trade and capital movements) without also some ‘positive’ economic integration (creating joint institutions that may upscale taxation and regulation) has a disciplining effect on labour and governments. In this chapter, we focus on the disciplines specific to TTIP that come on top of the general disciplining effect of FTAs.

2. Another main difference is the timing of impact assessment. In the EU this takes place before the regulatory proposal (by the Commission), which is subsequently debated (and can be significantly changed) by the legislators, while in the US the IA has to be done by the agency at the time of deciding on the regulation (O’Connor Close and Mancini 2007: 8).

3. At the time of writing, the European Commission was revising its internal Impact Assessment Guidelines. The resolution adopted by the European Parliament on this revision in November 2014 urged reforms that would make the Commission’s IAs more similar to those of the US. For example, the (already existent) Impact Assessment Board (IAB) would in the future have to give a positive opinion on an impact assessment before a proposal can be adopted. In December 2014, the European Commission announced that the IAB would be renamed the Regulatory Scrutiny Board and be able to review existing regulations in a ‘fitness check’, calling upon the Commission to revise or withdraw rules. This is coming close to the scrutiny functions of the OIRA.

4. These are Eurochambres, the European Services Forum (ESF), the European Association of Craft, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (known by its French acronym, UEAPME), the Transatlantic Business Council, the Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN), the American Chamber of Commerce to the EU (AmCham EU) and the European Council of American Chambers of Commerce (AmChams in Europe).

5. To some extent, similar provisions can be found in other ‘new generation’ bilateral trade agreements concluded or being negotiated by the EU and the US. However, the level of ambition in TTIP in terms of the sectoral and horizontal regulatory cooperation commitments is unprecedented.

6. One top US trade official even stated explicitly that ‘[t]he US is using transatlantic trade negotiations to push for a fundamental change in the way business regulations are drafted in the EU to allow business groups greater input earlier in the process’ (cited in Donnan 2014; see also Myant and O’Brien 2015).

7. Here and elsewhere we refer to the regulatory systems and levels of protection at both the supranational and the Member State level.

8. On the webpage of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) (2015) dedicated to TTIP we can

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