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Single Market 2.0: the European Union as a Platform. Research Papers in Law 2/2020.

Renda, Andrea (2020) Single Market 2.0: the European Union as a Platform. Research Papers in Law 2/2020. UNSPECIFIED.

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    Abstract

    ften defined as “unfinished business”, the European Union’s market integration process appears to have become more fragile than ever at the beginning of the new decade. Already in 2010, the Monti report denounced the existence of a Single Market “fatigue”, which made it difficult to complete the market integration process, especially in most difficult areas such as services.1 Today, Brexit potentially threatens the future attractiveness of the Single Market, by depriving the Union of its third largest economy and leading to an unprecedented thorn in the EU’s pride, as a Member of the Union sets sail. At the same time, the post-Brexit single market may become more cohesive and ambitious, as one of the most reluctant Member States leaves the group: the Union may also have the opportunity to re-discover some of the features of continental Europe’s legal and economic traditions, from Civil Law rules to state-led industrial policy, which faced obstacles when the UK was in the Union.2 Against this background, the challenges for the Single Market project do not end with Brexit. To the contrary, EU policymakers are confronted with a frustrating prospect: as they try to complete the Single Market, technological evolution is pushing the frontier of integration further, requiring new efforts and policies to fully achieve the desired goal. In particular, the digital transformation is changing the traditional, textbook economics of market integration, based on tenets such as economies of scale and the four freedoms. The rise of the digital economy requires a radical change in the policies for the Single Market, as well as in the trade policies that underpin the whole market integration process. Trends such as the virtualisation, servitisation and platformisation of the economy (as described below), coupled with the rise of the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence, make market integration at once more appealing and increasingly challenging for EU policymakers, projecting the Single Market into a complete new dimension, in which the “Fifth Freedom” (the free circulation of non-personal data) is intertwined with new concerns with the need to protect fundamental rights, and at the same time secure Europe’s technological sovereignty.

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    Item Type: Other
    Subjects for non-EU documents: EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > information technology policy
    EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > Brexit
    EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > economic and financial affairs > Single Market
    Subjects for EU documents: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Series and Periodicals: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Annual Reports: UNSPECIFIED
    Series: Series > College of Europe (Brugge) > Research Papers in Law
    Depositing User: Daniel Pennell
    Official EU Document: No
    Language: English
    Date Deposited: 08 Jun 2021 12:08
    Number of Pages: 26
    Last Modified: 08 Jun 2021 12:08
    URI: http://aei.pitt.edu/id/eprint/103424

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