Transatlantic Trade Agreement Could Improve Regulatory Cooperation, VCI Says

At the G8 summit in Northern Ireland, the United States and the European Union agreed to begin negotiations on a broad bilateral trade agreement. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would be the biggest such pact in history, worth around £100 billion (about €117 million) to the EU economy and £80 billion (over $125 billion) to the U.S. economy, said UK Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking at the summit. The first round of talks will be held next month in Washington.

Responding to the news, Germany's chemical industry association Verband der Chemischen Industrie (VCI) commented that the agreement has many positive aspects for chemical producers. However, general manager Utz Tillmann said the association regrets that audiovisual services were excluded from the talks, thus unnecessarily straining the atmosphere between the two negotiating blocs.

For some time, as VCI points out, the German chemical industry has been calling for an ambitious transatlantic trade agreement. "From our viewpoint, an improved regulatory cooperation has the greatest potential," Tillmann said, adding that different legal requirements not only considerably impair the movement of goods but are also "very costly."

While remarking that U.S. industrial import tariffs, at 2.25%, are relatively low, the VCI nevertheless calculates that European chemical companies paid almost €700 million to the U.S. treasury in 2010.

For the U.S. side, Larry Sloan, president of the Society of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates (SOCMA), commented that the proposed agreement is "an enormous opportunity to expand trade with Europe, our second-largest trade partner behind Canada and Mexico."