Memo

Memo to the commissioner responsible for trade

Publishing date: 04 September 2024
Authors: Petros C. Mavroidis André Sapir

You face three main challenges: maintain the EU’s commitment to open markets at home and abroad by continuing to adhere to the multilateral rules-based trading system; continue to sign and implement free-trade agreements; and head-off the resistance from the Global South to trade-climate policies such as the carbon border adjustment mechanism. To meet the challenges, you must champion open trade and multilateralism despite the headwinds, continue to facilitate security and climate cooperation, tackle distorting industrial policy by pushing for World Trade Organisation reform, resist Chinese or US trade coercion and find new ways to address the trade-climate-development nexus.

Key actions:

Champion open trade and multilateralism
Resist coercion; push WTO reform
Address the trade-climate-development nexus

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About the authors

Petros C. Mavroidis

Petros C. Mavroidis is a Non-resident fellow at Bruegel and a Professor of Law at Columbia University. He is a member of the Institut de droit international and has acted as chief reporter (along with Henrik Horn) for the American Law Institute study “Principles of International Trade: the WTO”. He has previously taught at EUI (Florence), Princeton, and ULB (Brussels), and has been employed by the WTO where he is now advising developing countries.
André Sapir

André Sapir, a Belgian citizen, is a Senior fellow at Bruegel. He is also University Professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and Research fellow of the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Between 1990 and 2004, he worked for the European Commission, first as Economic Advisor to the Director-General for Economic and Financial Affairs, and then as Principal Economic Advisor to President Prodi, also heading his Economic Advisory Group. In 2004, he published 'An Agenda for a Growing Europe', a report to the president of the Commission by a group of independent experts that is known as the Sapir report. After leaving the Commission, he first served as External Member of President Barroso’s Economic Advisory Group and then as Member of the General Board (and Chair of the Advisory Scientific Committee) of the European Systemic Risk Board based at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.

André has written extensively on European integration, international trade and globalisation. He holds a PhD in economics from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he worked under the supervision of Béla Balassa. He was elected Member of the Academia Europaea and of the Royal Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts.