This morning's press release from Michel Barnier, European Commissioner for the Internal Market, announcing the achievement of a revision of the "Government Procurement Agreement“, the pact that regulates the rules that governments must comply with in granting contracts for services and infrastructure.
Indeed, it is known that national powers tend to favor companies within their own borders. The update of the GPA, according to WTO estimates, will create 100 billion of new international exchanges in sectors which, especially in "virtuous" countries, enjoy considerable protection. Mario Monti has more than once recalled the importance of opening the single market to competition, when it came to prodding the Franco-German orthodoxy.
The revamped GPA will now need to be approved by at least two-thirds of the fifteen signatory members of the initial version. The authorities hope that the agreement will boost trade not only within the European Union, but also with primary economic partners: China, Canada, Switzerland, the United States, Japan, Korea among the most important.
The GPA review is a right step in the right direction, but it will certainly not be enough. However, it also has a symbolic as well as a practical meaning: it demonstrates the fact that, beyond the political interests that have so far blocked European reforms, there is also the strength and the will to get a handle on those mechanisms that growth of the economyand hinder the way out of the recession.
In fact, many economists point out that to help "austeritized" countries to revive growth, it would be enough for those with a surplus to adopt policies to stimulate internal demand to absorb the productive capacity of the peripheral economies.
Monti has often remarked how the closure of the markets slows down the flow of capital within the Union, even at the European level. In particular, the services sector, for which Barnier is responsible in Brussels, is one of those most bound by restrictive trade regulations: in fact, in Germany itself, the tertiary sector is anything but competitive, and has been defined by the Economist as "protected and inefficient".
Greater opening of the markets, on the other hand, would not instantly turn into greater exports by the PIIGS: if the latter were not the first to implement the reforms necessary to regain the lost competitiveness shares, it would probably be the economies already themselves more competitive to benefit internally from greater freedom in trade.
Nonetheless, the revision of the Gpa is a small step in the right direction, waiting for European policy to continue along the same path.
Attachments: GPA Public procurement international agreement.pdf
