IP/05/961

Brussels, 18 July 2005

EU on the right track in implementing the Internal Market

Member States have made impressive progress in transposing Internal Market Directives, leading to one of the best achievements ever. Unfortunately, too often, Member States still incorrectly apply Internal Market rules: only four Member States have managed to reduce the number of infringement cases against them.

Internal Market and Services Commissioner Charlie McCreevy said: “I congratulate Member States on this impressive achievement. Nevertheless, there is still much to do in certain areas: despite 11 Member States having reached the target of 1.5% transposition deficit and another 5 being very close, 9 Member States have still not reached the target, and I encourage them to redouble their efforts. However, I don’t want to detract from the overall result of this Scoreboard - I am delighted with it and hope this trend continues.”

Transposition of Internal Market Directives

• The transposition deficit - the average percentage per Member State of Internal Market Directives in force that have not been written into national law - is now 1.9% for EU-25 Member States, compared to 7.1% last year which is the second best result ever;
• The transposition deficit is slightly higher for EU-25 at 2.1%, which is 0.1% down from June 2004;
• The new Member States thus perform better than the EU-15 Member States, despite having to absorb the whole acquis in a short time frame;
• 245 or 15% of Internal Market Directives have not been transposed on time into national law in one or more of those Member States. In some cases, transposition is over two years overdue;
• Lithuania, Hungary and Slovenia are top of the league. Denmark and Finland are best among EU-15. Malta, Spain, the Slovak Republic, Sweden and the UK also show outstanding results; they all achieve the 1.5% transposition deficit target set by the European Council;
• The Netherlands, Ireland, Poland, Cyprus and Austria are on the wrong side of the target, but still close;
• Portugal, the Czech Republic (worst among EU-10!), Greece, Luxemburg and Italy all perform very badly, with transposition deficits of more than double the 1.5% target.

Transposition of Financial Services Action Plan (FSAP) Directives – taking stock

• Now that most actions of the FSAP have been completed, it is time to take stock: it is striking that, even more so on FSAP directives, the top performers are EU-10 Member States (except for Denmark, Austria and Germany);
• Worst performers are, in decreasing order, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Greece, Sweden, Portugal, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic and, surprisingly for a major financial player, the UK.

Infringements and Alternative Problem-Solving

• The Internal Market Strategy 2003-2006 called for a reduction of 50% by 2006, but only 4 EU-15 Member States (Belgium, Austria, France and the Netherlands) have actually managed to reduce the number of infringement cases against them. Greece, Germany, Sweden and Denmark have the highest number of additional cases in the past year. Of the EU-10 Member States, no less than 13 infringement proceedings were opened against Poland in the last year.
• No Member State is even close to achieving a 50% reduction by 2006.
• Package meetings are an efficient tool in solving infringement proceedings at an early stage: results were booked within 6 months in over 50% of cases (35% were solved within 6 months of the package meeting and a decisive procedural step was taken within the same time frame in a further 20% of cases).
• Solvit, the online problem resolution network for complaints about the incorrect application of EU rules by public authorities (see IP/02/1558), has seen its case flow double over the last year. France, Germany and Spain handled the most cases.

Transposition of European standards

• Despite the importance of European standards for industry, many national standards organisations are failing to transpose European standards on time. Ten Member States have a transposition deficit of over 1,000 standards. However, most Member States have dramatically improved their record compared with last year.

Practical effects of the Internal Market

• The extent to which prices of tradable goods and services converge across Member States is a reliable indicator or how well the Internal Market functions. The long-term trend seems to indicate that price dispersion consistently decreases.
• The longer countries are a member of the EU, the more prices for tradable goods have converged across Member States.

The full text of the Internal Market Scoreboard is at:

http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/score/index_en.htm

Annex

Internal Market Scoreboard 2005:

Transposition and application of Internal Market rules (details)

Transposition – EU-25 Member States

EU-25 Member State transposition deficit, as at 1/6/2005 – 1604 directives

EU-15 Member State performance in meeting 0% target for Directives whose transposition is over 2 years late, as at 1/6/2005

Transposition - Financial Services Action Plan Directives

EU-25 Member State transposition deficit, as at 1/6/2005 – 18 directives

Infringement cases against EU-15 Member States, as at 1 May 2005

Infringement cases against EU-10 Member States, as at 1 May 2005

Number of European and harmonised standards whose transposition is late

First Division

[Graphic in PDF & Word format]

HES stands for “Harmonised European Standards”, OES stands for “Other European Standards”

Second Division
[Graphic in PDF & Word format]