European Union News - Internal Market

The Council met on 4 of October and reached an agreement on a draft regulation aimed at increasing transparency and reducing risk in the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market. The Presidency of the EU, on behalf of the Council, will start negotiations with the European Parliament, with a view to reaching agreement at first reading.

The Council confirmed its agreement on economic governance. The Council will adopt the package without further discussion, once the texts have been finalised in all official languages following an agreement voted at the European Parliament reached after intensive negotiations.

According to the Budgetary Control Committee at the European Parliament, the European Police College (CEPOL) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) should be granted a discharge for the way in which they managed their funding in financial 2009, but the Council of Ministers should not

In September, the Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI) declined strongly by 3.4 points in both the EU and the euro area, reaching the level of 94.0 and 95.0, respectively. The decrease reflects broad-based cross-sector deterioration in sentiment, with particularly strong losses in confidence in industry and services. In addition the data for the Business Climate Indicator (BCI) showed for the euro area fell for the seven month in a row and is now in slightly negative territory.

Eurostat published its latest estimations on the holiday trips made by the EU residents in 2010. According to this office, EU residents made one billion holiday trips, of which more than three-quarters were domestic trips, within the country of residence, and around one quarter were outbound trips outside the country of residence.

The European Parliament approved in the plenary session the economic governance package of six new draft laws. However the plenary vote was tight with left-of-centre groups abstaining and voting against some parts of the deal for fear that the package is overly focused on budgetary correction. Now the Council can formally agree on the new economic governance plans.

The Internal Market Committee approved a non-legislative resolution in which it proposes an electronic public procurement passport that could make tendering for public procurement contracts less cumbersome and costly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The European Parliament approved in a resolution to earmark EU structural funds to the tourism industry in order to rehabilitate declining areas, innovate and roll out high-quality services that build on a multicultural heritage. Additionally, MEPs proposed to create a European quality tourism label, identifying common quality criteria, and a European Tourism Card, with a common set of passengers' right.

According to the results from the latest Eurobarometer, most of citizens are satisfied with the Single Market offers in terms of a bigger choice of products, jobs and fair competition. However, they also consider only the big companies benefit the Single Market. Also in the survey a 35% of Europenas are not aware of the Single Market and its benefits.

The European Payments Council (EPC) is undertaking a standardisation process for payments over the internet ('e-payments'). The Commission decided to open an antitrust investigation with regard to this standardisation process to ensure that competition is not unduly restricted, for example through the exclusion of new entrants and payment providers who are not controlled by a bank.

The Commission presided the signature of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in which libraries, publishers, authors, and their collecting societies have agreed to a set of Key Principles that will give European libraries and similar cultural institutions the possibility to digitise and make available on line out-of-commerce books and learned journals which are part of their collections.