Economy 12-06-2024
The EU will put additional tariffs on electric cars produced in China, the European Commission announced on Wednesday (12 June), as preliminary result of a anti-subsidy investigation showed prices being distorted by Chinese state support.
G7 countries should work with China to put in place climate-aligned trade policies needed to accelerate global climate action, by harnessing the power of international trade to promote innovation, reduce costs, and stimulate demand for green goods, write Matt Piotrowski and Joseph Dellatte.
While the imposition of new tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles proves controversial within the EU due to the fear of Chinese retaliation, the option of negotiations has been met with increasing attention.
Amid growing calls for economic sanctions against Israel in view of the worsening humanitarian toll of its military operations in Gaza, EU trade ministers briefly discussed the issue on Thursday (30 May) but remained far from deciding on actual steps.
Speaking in Brussels on Tuesday (14 May), Mehmet Şimşek added that the EU and Turkey share “equal blame” for the deterioration in their relationship in recent years.
On the last leg of his European tour in Hungary, Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday (8 May) is expected to tighten ties with Budapest, its closest ally in the European Union. After Paris, Xi's visits to
EU countries and European institutions must do much more to share and centralise sensitive data, to better apprehend economic security risks and more efficiently protect supply chains from increasingly predacious geopolitical actors, writes Mathieu Duchâtel.
After German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to Beijing, France's Emmanuel Macron must make clear when President Xi visits Paris that de-risking is more than just 'made in Brussels', write Gesine Weber and Earl Wang.
The European Commission played down fears that the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) could succumb to a Donald Trump presidency as pressure on high-level officials from both sides increased ahead of their meeting in Leuven, Belgium, on Thursday (4 April).
On a three-day official visit in Brazil, Emmanuel Macron proposed building a "new agreement" between the EU and Mercosur, which his Foreign Minister imagines to be broader than just trade. Critics and supporters of the original deal are now awaiting further details.
The ratification of CETA, the trade agreement between the EU and Canada, rejected last week by the Senate, will not be submitted to the National Assembly before the European elections, the government has confirmed, so as not to "instrumentalise the debate".
With the Senate having just rejected the trade agreement with Canada (CETA) and a new rejection looming in the National Assembly just before the European elections, France could ignore this decision. The opposition is denouncing this as an anti-democratic move.
Despite the passing of the Critical Raw Materials Act in 2023, Europe's reliance on importing critical raw materials remains a concern. In this series, Euractiv explores the EU's different routes to close the competitiveness gap in raw materials and decrease reliance on unpredictable suppliers.
“We’re not de-risking,” one expert told Euractiv. “What’s happening is that China is not importing from us. And the main reason is that they are substituting our imports.”
The world's trade ministers gathered in the UAE on Monday (26 February) for a high-level WTO meeting with no clear prospects for breakthroughs, amid geopolitical tensions and disagreements.
It is highly unlikely that the hotly-contested EU-Mercosur free trade agreement will be concluded before the EU elections in June, French and German MPs familiar with the matter told Euractiv France.
Germany’s liberal FDP party wants to reopen negotiations on the EU’s Due Diligence Directive after the issue was removed from the agenda of a meeting of EU ambassadors last Friday, which the party says shows the poor quality of the preliminary agreement reached in December.
The European Commission and Canada have agreed on the "interpretation” of parts of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) that relate to investor protection from environmental regulation, in a push by Brussels to persuade member states to ratify the bilateral multibillion-euro deal.
It’s been 25 years since the four Mercosur nations and the EU vowed to sign a free-trade agreement. Twenty-five years of political to-ing and fro-ing, now compounded with pro-environmental imperatives pushing negotiations to the brink of collapse.
In a letter sent on Wednesday (31 January), France's Greens called on President Emmanuel Macron to form a coalition with EU countries that also oppose the EU-Mercosur deal in its current form - an idea Macron's camp has already dismissed as hopeless.
Top EU officials struggled to keep EU-US trade and tech talks alive this week, with pressure on both sides of the Atlantic rising to lock in a final policy deal before the November US presidential election.
The EU-Mercosur trade agreement should be split into two distinctive parts to circumvent French resistance based on agricultural issues, the German car industry has proposed, in a bid to boost export markets other than China.
France's far-right Rassemblement National and far-left LFI are proposing to introduce a form of 'agricultural exception' - which, as is already the case for the arts, would exempt some agricultural products from the EU's free trade agreements with other countries.
An alliance of German steelmaking states have put their weight behind a global sustainable steel club that the US hopes will reduce China's ability to undercut European and American markets, and welcomed the support for the industry’s green transition.
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal and MPs from all sides of the political spectrum have reaffirmed France's opposition to the EU-Mercosur deal in a timely political move as farmers fiercely opposing the deal have stepped up protests and plan to march on Paris.
