• Facilitating Trade
• Cooperating with Governments
• Enlarging the EU
• Our Mediterranean and Eastern neighbours
• Competitiveness and Innovation Programme
• Listening to Stakeholders

EU-USA - Regulatory Cooperation

Regulatory cooperation is an important tool to helping dismantle existing regulatory barriers and prevent new ones from emerging. Since the development of the EU-US Guidelines for Regulatory Cooperation and Transparency, Regulatory authorities on both sides aim at achieving greater convergence of technical rules through a number of sectoral and methodological regulatory dialogues. Since its inception in 2005, the High Level Regulatory Cooperation Forum has met regularly to focus on key regulatory issues of common interest and to facilitate the exchange of best regulatory practice across sectors.

There is a high interest among various stakeholders, including the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue (TABD), to see that the EU and the US government's prioritise cooperation efforts aimed at the creation of a "barrier-free transatlantic market".

History

In May 1998, the EU and the US launched the Transatlantic Economic Partnership (TEP) [115 KB] . The TEP Action Plan, in its section on bilateral actions in the area of technical barriers to trade in goods, called for action to address such barriers, including improving the dialogue between EU and US regulators. The Action Plan also asked to identify and implement jointly defined general government guidelines for effective regulatory cooperation, and for improving access to each other's regulatory procedures.

On the basis of the TEP Action Plan, the Commission and the US Government developed Guidelines on Regulatory Cooperation and Transparency [40 KB] , endorsed by the EU-US Summit in May 2002. The Guidelines enshrine a political commitment to dialogue between EU and US regulators. The objective is to improve cooperation and to promote transparency when developing new and amending existing technical regulations. A dialogue between the EC and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on methodological issues, like risk and impact assessment, has also been established. The Guidelines are implemented by regularly updated Road Maps.

The 2005 EU-US Summit launched an Initiative to Enhance Transatlantic Economic Integration and Growth [46 KB] . One of the initiative's 11 priorities was to promote EU-US regulatory cooperation. The aim was "to build effective mechanisms to promote better quality regulation, minimize unnecessary regulatory divergences to facilitate transatlantic trade and investment and increase consumer confidence in the transatlantic market".

High Level EU-U.S. Regulatory Cooperation Forum

To reinforce regulatory cooperation, the 2005 Summit established a High Level EU-US Regulatory Cooperation Forum to focus on key regulatory issues and to facilitate the sharing of experience and best practice between the sectoral dialogues and the EC-OMB dialogue on methodological issues.

The High Level EU-US Regulatory Cooperation Forum provides senior level support and visibility to regulatory cooperation efforts. It provides a unique platform to bring together senior American and European regulators to exchange views on cross-cutting regulatory issues. The Forum plays a crucial role for upstream cooperation by helping to identify prospective areas for EU-US regulatory cooperation, and facilitates early warning about possible divergent regulatory approaches.

Regulatory Dialogues

Services of the Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry are in charge of regulatory dialogues in the following sectors:

• Pharmaceuticals
• Medical Devices
• Cosmetics
• Automobile Safety
• Chemicals
• Radio and telecommunications, ICT and electrical equipment

Recent achievements from these dialogues have been noted in the Transatlantic Economic Council's first Progress Report [42 KB] .