The biggest market in the world
Today, trade between the member states of the European Union stands at 2,935,000 million euros, some 75% more than EU exports to third countries. In fact, if we discount the cases of Greece and the United Kingdom, all the member states have a closer trading relationship with other countries in the EU than with trading partners outside the Union. Thus, according to Eurostat figures, the majority of the European Union's member states have two or three trading partners within the EU that make up more than 50% of all their exports whether inside or outside the Union.
Despite all the progress that has been made in the development of the so-called 'Interior Market', the work done cannot by any means be considered finished. There still remain some invisible barriers that need to be eliminated if we want to obtain all the benefits of an integrated Single Market. For example, when we want to purchase on the Internet or access online services such as videos, music, games or books, we continue to do so as if there were 28 separate markets. It is precisely for this reason that this December the European Commission has put forward an ambitious proposal to create a genuine 'Single Digital Market'. A proposal that attempts to facilitate electronic commerce between EU countries and widen access to the digital content that a citizen can acquire in one member state to the whole Union.
This is an example of the efforts that the Commission wants to make in strengthening the Interior Market as a lever to activate our economy. If we take a look at the evolution of trade inside the Union in recent years, we see that between 2004 and 2008 there was sustained growth in the level of exports from one EU country to another, but that from the fourth quarter of 2008, and coinciding with the impact of the crisis, trade in the Single Market suffered a steep decline. This trend was turned around from the second quarter of 2009 and from then until 2011 it grew until it recovered pre-2008 levels.
In this analysis of trade within the European Union over time, we can see that Spain is one of the countries that has experienced a change in trading trends within the Union: while in 2002 it was a net importer of products from other EU partners with a negative balance of trade of 21.2 billion euros, in 2013 it had become a net exporter with a positive balance of trade of 94 billion euros. It is therefore necessary to take full advantage of the potential of the Single Market as a genuine engine to drive the weak economic recovery, but also to reinforce our presence in the world.
In effect, the huge attraction of the Single Market gives us an extraordinary power of leadership in trade on a global scale. The European Union has a common trade policy and the European Commission is charged with negotiating treaties and trade agreements for all the countries in the Union. As is well known, it is currently negotiating the TTIP, the trade agreement with the US, which once passed will mean the creation of the world's largest free trade area, a leap forward in the same way as the creation of the Single Market in the EU was in its time. It is thus an opportunity that we cannot let pass us by.