Key messages

• Business opposes the weaponisation of the sanctions policy and the use of such measures to pursue economic interests. Sanctions are designed specifically to enforce the respect of international law to counter fundamental threats to peace and stability and the protection of human rights and must be limited to these core purposes.
• We welcome the political attention to this matter and support a more assertive approach by the EU to protect its sovereignty in economic diplomacy. Unilateral measures that risk escalation with third countries should remain an option of last resort and multilateral approaches should be actively sought where possible. Especially with the USA as our traditional ally, the main aim must remain to achieve alignment on sanctions policies and implementation. A close cooperation regarding sanctions should also be established with the UK as part of the future relation.
• The aim must be to deter harmful action by third countries and, if necessary, to increase the costs for such harmful action. To do so, the toolbox needs to be better equipped with well-targeted, non-discriminatory, and well workable and implementable solutions. In the current absence of an effective mechanism, EU companies are caught between a rock and a hard place.
• The EU, together with its allies, should take international leadership on this issue leveraging on its economic and political weight. The EU should insist on a multilateral strategy as this will increase the political strength of the argument.

Read our position paper: Recommendations to strengthen the EU foreign economic diplomacy in the area of sanctions

BusinessEurope’s EU Reform Barometer 2019 “Building an EU for European Businesses to succeed globally”, published on 20 March 2019, shows that the EU needs to do more to improve its competitiveness as EU growth has now been lower than US growth for 7 of the last 10 years. In addition, the Reform Barometer contains our annual survey of our member federations regarding progress on structural reform.

This year’s Reform Barometer looks in particular at how Europe is falling behind in its ability to develop world-leading firms.

We arrive at this conclusion for 3 reasons:

• None of the top 10 global companies by market capitalisation are European.
• Western Europe’s share of the top 10% of global firms in terms of profitability has dropped from 36% in the late 1990s to 24% now.
• Finally, when considering large high-growth firms/’unicorns’ (start-ups that have reached 1 billion dollar market value within a short timeframe), the EU has not matched other regions when it comes to developing such firms, with the number and average value of unicorns in the EU significantly smaller than those in the USA and China.

Against this background it is concerning that, according to our survey of member federations, governments have failed to step up their reform efforts.  Our member federations consider that member states have satisfactorily implemented only 20% of the essential reforms agreed with the EU.

Detailed assessments by national member federations of progress on the country-specific recommendations (CSRs) issued by the European Commission for Greece can be downloaded below.