Acceso usuarios
Jacques Pelkmans
Recent Free Trade Area (FTA) agreements of the EU are ‘deep and comprehensive’. This can be explained by the various and complex ‘trading costs’ that business encounters when accessing a foreign market and which business is keen to reduce as much as possible. The paper examines what ‘deep and comprehensive’ means more precisely in four EU FTAs: CETA and EU/Korea, and two FTAs that have not yet been completed (TTIP and EU/Japan). It provides a tentative explanation of the nature of these four modern EU FTAs by taking a closer look at the business dimension, in particular transnational value chains in some prominent sectors, the growing importance of services and inter-sectoral linkages.
