The parliamentary committee for internal market and consumer protection (IMCO) is working on one of the most fundamental principles of the European Union: the single market.

The entire Brexit saga shows once more how difficult it is to leave the single market once you have been a part of it. But also how beneficial it is to be a member of the EU.

After decades of living in a common internal market, many people seem to have forgotten how important it is, and how easy.

But when you travel to for example the United States, and you forget your adapter, you can’t even charge your mobile phone – a problem that never occurs when you travel on the European continent.

The internal market is not only about the free movement of goods and services. It’s also about standards, for products but also for consumer protection. That’s why worldwide people talk about “European standards”, as a label of global quality.

It is the task of the IMCO committee to make sure these European standards are upheld in every single space in Europe.

According to Petra De Sutter (Greens/EFA, Belgium), president of IMCO, “developing a long term strategy for better enforcement of Single Market rules” will be key for the committee’s agenda for the next five years.

Therefore, she says, it is “necessary to continue strengthening the internal market, in particular in a cross-border context, removing unjustified barriers and ensuring that the existing rules are properly and timely implemented and enforced.”

Next to the announced revision of the E-Commerce Directive or new Digital Services Act, the committee will need to have a lot of attention to what De Sutter calls “a single market fit for the digital age”.

“Since emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, are becoming key drivers for economic development and enhance the value of goods and services, we will be following with the utmost attention any developments in this area”, she said, adding that this is important for both business and consumers.

As a fourth major point for IMCO over the next five years, De Sutter mentions a “sustainable Single Market”. More concretely, she points out that “addressing the needs of a growing circular economy and the integration of environmental concerns into consumer policy will be a key priority.”

A politically-sensitive point that might interfere with the IMCO agenda is the free movement of people.

De Sutter fears that “member states may take disproportionate measures and apply administrative controls and procedures which make free movement more difficult and costly for SMEs going cross-border.”

But all in all, De Sutter thinks that the speedy growth of artificial intelligence will become the biggest challenge, needing “legislation linked to transparency, liability, safety and ethical rules for digital platforms, services and products”.

On the one hand, European companies need access to data for developing AI. On the other hand “consumer protection rules have to ensure that consumers have clear information on how to use AI-enabled products and services, that they have control over data generated by such products and services, and how that data is used”, she said.

IMCO coordinators are: Andreas Schwab (EPP, Germany), Christel Schaldemose (S&D, Denmark), Dita Charanzova (Renew, Czech Republic), Marcel Kolaja (Greens/EFA, Czech Republic), Virginie Joron (ID, France), Adam Bielan (ECR, Poland), Katerina Konecna (GUE/NGL, Czech Republic).

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With the digital makeover of the economy, which has allowed for transactions carried out by individuals and companies to be traced and recorded in real-time, traditional methods of collecting economic data, such as in-person surveys and interviews, run the risk of becoming outdated.

Digital records of such transactions—whether online or brick and mortar—at a product level and the growing ability to store and analyse such information offer an opportunity to better capture production and price statistics, says a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study authored by Gabriel Ehrlich of University of Michigan and others.

Such sales and price data, obtained directly and simultaneously from a single source, will also greatly refine measurement of economic activity and productivity at a product-level, according to the authors.

Advances in research and technology have also made it possible for digitized transactions data to be innovatively used to capture economic activity, the authors suggest. For instance, the “unified price index” technique developed by Redding and Weinstein (2018) makes it possible to capture the effect of changes in product appeal on their prices. However, the authors warn that more work is required to refine these techniques before they are incorporated by statistical agencies. Such agencies may not find it easy to access and process such kind of data, they argue.

Building key national indicators from product-level transactions data would also necessitate re-engineering of the statistical architecture in most countries to change how data is collected and accessed for official statistics. For instance, the simultaneous collection of price and quantity data requires combining the data collection activities that are currently spread over multiple arms of the statistical machinery. Such a shift, however, may be inevitable as non-response rates and costs of traditional surveys escalate over time, the authors argue.

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