Trade Policy

Despite EU’s engagement with the Mediterranean region and its active support for intra-regional integration initiatives, the data shows an impressive underperformance of Southern and Eastern Mediterranean Countries (SEMCs) in regional trade. Ideally, an energy rich North Africa and energy deficient neighbors in the South would unlock considerable opportunities for regional trade. Therefore, the following question looms large: How has EU’s trade policy contributed to the low market integration among the SEMCs? To answer this question, under the Market Power Europe and qualitative methodology, it is hypothesized that EU’s externalization of policies through different embedded tools such as rules of origin and outward processing schemes (OPS) has contributed to the divergence, instead of convergence, of trade among SEMCs. Research findings point to a distortion of competition between EU enterprises and African and third party enterprises in the benefit of European interests. Further, the results reveal that despite the higher complementarity between some of the SEMCs, still the predominant direction of trade is north-south, thanks to EU’s trade policy in the Mediterranean region.

Since the United Kingdom’s vote for exit from the European Union - i.e. Brexit (June 2016), the proponents of the leave campaign have claimed that the idea of Global Britain will result in an independent trade policy, which can expand the UK’s trade geography and scope through striking free trade agreements (FTAs). This study aimed at examining this claim, first by looking at the official statistics on the signed FTAs, and then, by conducting semi-structured interviews with British stakeholders from different social groups in order to see Global Britain's future potentials. The findings from this qualitative-quantitative approach revealed that the possible gains from the post-Brexit FTAs will only manifest in the long run and in some sectors. Furthermore, the prospects of an independent trade policy will be constrained by the UK’s need to align with the EU standards and the unclear future of the FTAs with major economies like the US. Thus, as the theoretical framework of economic geography suggests, British trade relations will still depend on geographical proximity, and will not be shifted drastically by the idea of Global Britain; an idea which seems to serve as a strategy to positively portray Brexit for the domestic and international businesses and people.