Arrive Magazine - September/October, 2007

regulatory cooperation, highlighting specific areas, including safety testing for automobiles, chemicals and cosmetics. In deference to political sensitivities on both continents, agriculture and other industries that are subject to significant tariffs, such as steel and textiles, are not part of the framework. Nor would anything in the agreement stop politicians from doing what they can to keep “national champions” in local hands—as happened in April, when AT&T dropped its plans to buy a large stake of Telecom Italia, under political pressure from the Italian government. Nevertheless, supporters of the framework say it will help to expose such protectionism by encouraging impact assessments, which will help citizens to see what economic nationalism costs their nation’s economy in lost competitiveness— and thus make it harder for politicians to justify blocking foreign investment.

Not everyone is cheering the agreement. Ron Blackwell, chief economist at the AFL-CIO, says there is a need for greater attention to the “social and

Common U.S.-EU standards
would become the de facto
global norm, leveling
the regulatory playing
field everywhere.

environmental aspect of integration.” Never mind the argument, set forth in a book that made the bestseller lists in Germany last year, that a transatlantic common market could help protect the

environment and the rights of workers
around the world by giving the U.S. and the
EU more leverage over China and other
emerging powers. Blackwell sees little hope
of such results unless America and Europe
make an explicit commitment to them.
On the other hand, some proponents
of free market economics fear that the
agreement might lead to an excessive
tightening of regulation across the board.
“If the goal is openness, competition

and consumer welfare, then it’s a goal worth pursuing,” says Daniel T. Griswold of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. “If the goal is to bind foreign competitors in the same regulatory web that domestic companies find themselves, then it’s a fool’s errand and shouldn’t be pursued.”

But GE’s Vassallo, representing the business community that has driven the campaign to eliminate transatlantic trade barriers, discounts the danger of such upward regulatory creep.

“If convergence goes in that direction,” he says, “then we will not be for it.”

He was a hardworking farm boy.

She was an Italian supermodel.

He knew he would have just one chance to impress her.

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