Business Roundtable last week welcomed recommendations by the U.S.-EU High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth that include the launching of negotiations on trade, investment and regulatory cooperation. BRT also lauded the endorsement of the transatlantic talks by U.S. President Barack Obama, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso. (Joint statement)
In a BRT release, Caterpillar’s Doug Oberhelman, who chairs the BRT International Engagement Committee, said, “Ambitious U.S.-EU negotiations will strengthen transatlantic economic relations and reinforce the open market and rules-based principles of the global trading system.
The transatlantic negotiations, which BRT wants to get going before summer, continue to draw news and commentary.
Today's Wall Street Journal editorialized today (subscription), "An Atlantic Trade Opportunity -- The biggest challenge will be avoiding bad regulatory habits."
Regulatory "harmonization" across countries is built into the European Union's DNA. The set of rules with which all EU members must comply runs to more than 100,000 pages, and the European Commission and Parliament seem constantly to be dreaming up new ways to "level the playing field." The U.S. tends to prefer regulatory competition, though the Obama Administration's temptation may be to use trade talks to import the European model.
This would be the worst outcome, which would mean that Brussels would write the rules for half the world economy. As one former World Trade Organization official told us, the trans-Atlantic talks could have a wide range of outcomes, from a truly liberating one with far more competition to one that cements the worst policies from both sides. A free-trade opening of this magnitude would be a terrible thing to waste.
Der Spiegel's website reports other possible difficulties, "EU-US Trade Talks : Southern European States Put on the Brakes ":
Germany is pushing for the broadest possible free-trade agreement between the European Union and the United States, against resistance from France and other Southern European nations which want to exempt issues like food regulation and gene technology from the talks in order to protect the interests of their farmers,
"We're aiming for a big breakthrough rather than a minimum consensus," said Economy Minister Philipp Rösler of the pro-business Free Democratic Party. "It would therefore be damaging to limit the agenda from the start and to exclude certain areas."
BRT CEOs met with Minister Rösler in late 2011, later speaking with Chancellor Angel Merkel to encourage movement on a U.S.-EU pact.
Indeed, Engler has been an advocate of negotiations toward a transatlantaic trade pact for at least four years, as President of the National Association of Manufacturers giving a speech in Belium in 2008, in which he said:
If we were to have such a huge free trade area, a real integrated transatlantic marketplace, it could well be a magnet for other countries wanting to join. We could set a high standard for totally free and open trade and invite others if they agree to our high standard.
Caterpillar's Oberhelman and Engler will brief reporters this Thursday on BRT’s trade and investment priorities this year.