OpenLobby.EU
Explore

European Policy Information Center

EPICENTER

EPICENTER, the European Policy Information Center, is an independent initiative of twelve leading think tanks from across Europe.

Lobbying Activity

Response to Digital Fairness Act

15 Oct 2025

The DFA risks overcomplicating the EUs dense regulatory framework, potentially causing legal uncertainty, undermining enforcement, and adding complexity for businesses due to overlapping obligations. SMEs face disproportionate compliance burdens, which could favour large incumbents, reduce market diversity, and hinder start-ups, impacting the dynamism of the European digital ecosystem. Overly rigid rules may deter investment, delay digital service rollouts, and widen the EUs competitiveness gap, particularly given challenges in scaling digital businesses. The DFA must target specific gaps with proportionate requirements, especially for SMEs, using clear, research-based definitions of terms like dark patterns to avoid capturing legitimate practices. Stronger enforcement and coordination among existing authorities, rather than new regimes, would improve efficiency and clarity in implementing the DFA. Issues like game licensing and digital shutdowns may be covered by existing laws (CRD, UCTD, UCPD), with gaps lying in enforcement clarity, not new legislation. A review or sunset clause would ensure the DFA remains adaptable, evidence-based, and responsive to technological change, preventing it from stifling innovation.
Read full response

Response to Commission Implementing Regulation for goods brought to the exclusive economic zone of Member States

30 Jul 2025

CBAM, despite its well-intentioned aims, may create more distortions than it fixes, so it should be rethought entirely. 1. Fundamental Nature and Intentions vs. Reality CBAMs intention is to "level the playing field between European manufacturers" and their foreign competitors. However, in practice, the CBAM functions as a tariff duty on certain imported goods, with costs proportional to their carbon footprint and the market price of CO2 allowances in the EUs ETS. Despite good intentions, CBAM could negatively impact the EU market due to administrative costs, selective application, and trade distortions. 2. Limitations of Simplification and Hidden Costs While the European Council adopted an amendment to exempt small importers from the carbon duty, this may not be enough. The simplification addresses only some direct costs of CBAM while leaving largely unaffected the much larger indirect costs. SMEs often part of complex value chains, will indirectly feel the impact if larger businesses face increased regulatory costs. CBAM and other environmental regulations require large businesses to track emissions from suppliers, including SMEs, forcing them to collect and provide similar information, even if not formally obliged to do so under the regulations themselves. SMEs may also face huge increases in the cost of their domestically sourced CBAM goods due to the phase-out of free allowances under ETS, regardless of their import volume from third countries. These administrative costs, while present, are potentially minor compared to the additional carbon costs companies will incur. 3. Selective Application to Intermediate Goods and Downstream Impacts The CBAM initially applies to imports of specific carbon intensive and at most significant risk of carbon leakage goods and selected precursors: cement, iron and steel, aluminium, fertilisers, electricity, and hydrogen. A significant concern is that CBAM does not apply to products down the value chain, even though they contain some of the intermediate products covered by the CBAM regulation. While CBAM might level the playing field in the EU steel market, it will not similarly benefit any downstream market like wind turbines. The increased price of steel in the EU (due to ETS prices and the phase-out of free allowances) would give wind turbine producers abroad a competitive edge because they will have access to cheaper steel in their own markets. This could ultimately make EU-made products even less competitive, not more. 4. Impact on EU Exporter Competitiveness and the Phase-out of Free Allowances A key element in maintaining the competitiveness of European businesses has been the distribution of free allowances under the ETS, which were intended to prevent carbon leakage the transfer of production to countries with laxer emission constraints. As CBAM comes into force, free allowances will be phased out. While this may help level the playing field for EU businesses domestically, it does not apply abroad. If a European manufacturer sells products in foreign markets with loosely regulated CO2 emissions, its production costs (including purchased allowances) may be too high to be competitive. This could lead to reduced competitiveness for European manufacturers abroad and incentivize businesses to relocate their production processes abroad for both covered and downstream goods. While CBAM is intended to protect EU companies from foreign competition within the European market; however, it may well damage EU companies in foreign markets. 5. International Trade Fragmentation The claim that CBAM is compliant with international trade rules is far from obvious, with many experts and several countries expressing concerns about significant trade distortions. Distortions may arise from: trade diversions, retaliatory measures by countries that are affected the most by the new rules, uneven impact within the EU, and a further fragmentation of international trade.
Read full response

Meeting with Ilhan Kyuchyuk (Member of the European Parliament)

8 Apr 2025 · Omnibus proposal & energy reform

Response to Single Market Strategy 2025

31 Jan 2025

The EU is lagging in economic freedom compared with the US, mainly in terms of the scale of government intervention and stringency of regulations. The EU is competitive to the US vis-à-vis the legal system, stability of money, and freedom to trade and invest. However, high taxes, excessive government intervention, high debt, and strict regulations undermine the EUs competitive advantages. The SM in the EU is a globally unique success story. However, the SM has not lived to its full potential. It has stalled at the halfway point, with the initial enthusiasm to integrate markets being replaced by fatigue. Nonetheless, strengthening the SM would add 713 billion in value over a decade (European Commission 2020). Imperfections of the SM have contributed to weaker growth in the EU. Over the past three decades, the EU has witnessed a decline in competitiveness, with rising labour costs and stagnant output. Borrowed funds have frequently been used to boost domestic consumption and increase labour costs rather than being directed toward productive investments. The rise in public debt is a consequence of the expansion of government spending, mainly in times of crisis. Debt levels across EU member states show significant variance, impacting both economic freedom and fiscal flexibility (Eurostat 2024c). The EUs loss of competitiveness is partly due to poor anticipation of population ageing and the underdevelopment of pension funds in half of the EU countries. These factors have led to increases in labour costs, which is detrimental to the price competitiveness of European companies. The hike in labour costs has also reduced the amount of capital available to finance growth and innovation, which explains why the EU has fallen behind the US and other more attractive regions. On revitalising the Single Market Make the SM a priority again. The original goal of removing regulatory and administrative barriers to cross-border exchange should be prioritised. The EU should establish and advocate for ambitious goals for the SM. Progress against these goals must be regularly evaluated using quantitative key performance indicators. Any new EU legislation should be accompanied by an evaluation of its implications for the SM. Legislation must be periodically assessed and reviewed to avoid over-regulation. The SM should not end at the borders of the EU. Efforts should be made to dismantle tariff and non-tariff barriers to facilitate increased trade with non-EU countries. More trade agreements are needed. There are still significant barriers and regulations limiting the extent of intra-EU trade in services which should be lifted. EU capital markets lag behind the US. The EU should turn its focus away from nationalism and towards mergers, acquisitions, and cooperation. The competition rules should be adjusted to the scale of the SM. State aid, mainly driven by green subsidies, has been on the rise. State aid distorts market relations and often favours a select few. State aid rules should return to their original setup where Article 107 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU dictated the conditions of aid provision and allowed state aid to be dispensed only in case of market failure. National authorisation and permitting schemes must be reevaluated across the industrial and infrastructure ecosystem to ease entrepreneurship in the SM. Mutual recognition of regulations in designated sectors should be fostered. The EU´s Better regulation toolbox (European Commission 2023) should be strengthened and enforced more effectively. Occupational regulations and the labour market should be liberalised. If an occupation remains unlicensed in a member state without significant adverse effects, other member states should be directed to abolish licensing requirements for that occupation. Policy recommendations outlined here in detail: https://www.epicenternetwork.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/EU-WIN_final_web.pdf
Read full response

Meeting with Helmut Brandstätter (Member of the European Parliament)

28 Jan 2025 · Exchange of Views

Meeting with Andrey Novakov (Member of the European Parliament)

13 Sept 2024 · Economic Research

Response to Strengthening the principle of equal pay between men and women through pay transparency

11 Aug 2021

Pay gap data is hard to calculate and hazardous to interpret. Different versions of the pay gap (between full-time workers, part-time workers, mean, median) will result in different answers and trends. The pay gap does not result from men and women doing the same job and being paid unequally. In the UK, there has been an Equal Pay Act since 1970 to prevent this. It results in part from men and women doing different jobs, and the consequent gaps in average pay. Most would agree that there are legitimate reasons why some roles will pay more than others, given that they differ in the skills required, the inherent attractiveness or unattractiveness of the work, and the degree of responsibility, among other factors. If women and men do different jobs then pay differentials are inevitable – as there are between any two groups where members have different employment patterns. Narrow pay gaps are not unequivocally positive. When Germany reunified in 1990, the gender pay gap fell sharply. This was because low-paid women in Eastern Germany lost jobs in large numbers (Hunt, 1997) . Italy has a narrower gap than the UK; but around 20 per cent fewer Italian women aged 15-64 are employed because the high cost of employing low-skilled workers means only relatively highly-skilled and better-paid women are in work. The purpose of this response is to outline legislation imposed by the UK government to increase awareness and improve pay equality, briefly examine the apparent pitfalls of top-down action plans to reduce gender pay gaps, and show lessons the EU can learn.
Read full response

Response to Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan

2 Mar 2020

The European Policy Information Center (Epicenter) has asked me to provide some feedback to this consultation. My remarks relate to three areas of prevention. Smoking In 2019, the EU country with the lowest smoking rate was Sweden. The country with the second lowest smoking rate was the UK. Sweden and the UK have achieved this thanks to widespread consumption of snus and e-cigarettes, respectively. Norway has also achieved very low smoking rates as a result of smokers switching to snus. Snus is a smokeless tobacco product which does not cause cancer, as the EU acknowledged when it removed the cancer warning from Swedish snus many years ago. Unfortunately, it has not repealed the unscientific ban on snus which covers every EU country except Sweden. Given the clear health gains in Sweden and Norway, repealing this ban should be a priority. Article 20 of the Tobacco Products Directive has created unnecessary regulations for e-cigarettes, capping nicotine levels, bottle sizes, and raising costs. It should be reviewed. The evidence is now clear that vaping is a gateway from smoking and is an important tool is the fight against cancer. The EU should be unequivocally pro-vaping (https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/erj/early/2020/02/20/13993003.00166-2020.full.pdf). Regulation is not the only obstacle to tobacco harm reduction. Scare stories emanating from the USA last year, which misrepresented deaths from the use of THC cartridges adulterated with Vitamin E acetate as deaths from conventional e-cigarettes, have discouraged smokers around the world from switching. It is unhelpful when senior EU spokespeople make inflammatory and unscientific statements about vaping, such as the claim that e-cigarettes are 'poison' (https://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/eu-commission-accused-of-ignoring-science-on-e-cigarettes/). We hope that the new health commissioner will take a more positive, pro-science view of tobacco harm reduction than her predecessor. Alcohol The consultation document mentions alcohol taxes and suggests that raising them could have a 'pivotal role' in prevention. Member states decide what rate alcohol should be taxed at and there is no obvious reason for the EU to intervene further. Rates vary enormously across the EU but there is no correlation between the rate of tax (adjusted for purchasing power) and levels of per capita consumption (see attached graph: r2= 0.03). In any case, reducing per capita alcohol consumption should not be seen as an end in itself. Moderate alcohol consumption confers significant health benefits and moderate consumers tend to live longer than abstainers (eg. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/769554). Food The consultation document suggests that the Farm to Fork strategy 'could help ensure that EU citizens have access to affordable healthy food'. Perhaps it could, but there are concerns that EU agencies will capitulate again to the anti-scientific 'Green' NGOs who got former Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Anne Glover, sacked in 2014. The best way to produce healthy and affordable food is to allow evidence-based innovation in agriculture. Further restrictions on pesticides and GMOs would hinder this and cost the public dearly (https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Ploughing-the-wrong-furrow.pdf). Finally, I note that the document refers to 'lifestyle choices'. Any action the EU takes in this area should respect people's choices. Paternalistic regulation should be resisted.
Read full response

Response to More efficient law-making in taxation: a move to QMV

21 Jan 2019

There are various arguments against this harmonisation per se, and the use of QMV to achieve it, many of which have been raised by organisations in different Member States through the Commission feedback process. This includes national sovereignty itself, and the importance of tax competition for smaller countries especially: there has recently been growing scholarly interest in the role of tax competition in boosting consumption and investment in central and eastern Europe, for instance (see Chirculescu, 2018), while the IEA has argued against harmonised financial regulation generally. A number of these organisations have outlined the fundamental dangers in these proposals. The Lithuanian Tax Payers’ Association (Lietuvos mokesčių mokėtojų asociacija) has raised the “loss of national sovereignty” and likelihood of negative impacts to “the business competitiveness of small countries in the Single Market”. Indeed, recent research by the Tax Foundation found that large industrialised nations tend to have higher statutory corporate income tax rates than developing countries. Moving to QMV meanwhile risks “a few large countries… pushing for tax issues in their favour”. IME Bulgaria also has “[increasing concern] about some initiatives that aim to shift the union away from its founding principles”. Ibec (of Ireland12) has raised the question of procedure: “the speed with which the legislative process takes place”, and the end point of “proportionate, fair and balanced legislation”, with further use of QMV would represent a threat to the principle of subsidiarity. First, the lack of substantive evidence for the need for greater use of QMV or the improvement which could be expected; meanwhile Member States have not been stopped from increasing tax revenues as a proportion of their economy, their tax to GDP ratio reaching 40.2% in 2017, the joint highest on record. Next, unanimity has already allowed significant changes, including the Anti Tax-Avoidance (ATAD) Directive and changes to VAT treatment. Spain’s Instituto de Estudios Bursátiles (IEB) has proposed that fiscal policy is “the final instrument that can be used by each Member State to deal with asymmetric shocks”; Spain's Unión de Contribuyentes (Taxpayers Union) also states that tax harmonisation will mean higher taxes. Thus far, among Member States, the Hungarian and Irish governments have opposed the proposal to harmonise taxes specifically, saying this damages competition in the single market. Hungary is heavily dependent on foreign investment, with the EU’s lowest corporate tax rate at 9 percent; Ireland’s is 12.5 percent. Germany and France support the proposal. Regarding the move to QMV itself, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Belgium support the proposal, while Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Malta, Cyprus and Luxembourg oppose it. Moving to QMV on taxation issues and restricting tax competition between Member States will harm the overall competitiveness of European economies, further deepening the divisions between large and smaller Member States. The Commission should therefore avoid this proposed move.
Read full response

Response to Fairness in platform-to-business relations

22 Nov 2017

Platform regulation remains unjustified Diego Zuluaga, Director, EPICENTER The Commission has asked for feedback on its impact assessment of platform-to-business (P2B) relations. The IA includes a number of alternative proposals for additional intervention to regulate contractual terms and information provision in this market. Our response contains the following observations: • The picture that emerges from the EC surveys of consumers and business regarding platforms is not of a market in which users are routinely abused. Rather, what we observe is a market where users are broadly happy, although they agree that things could always be better. Crucially, they have ways to make their discontent heard. • Establishing monopolistic abuse requires proving not just that platforms have the ability, but also the incentive to fleece customers. Economic analysis of platform markets under competitive conditions does not suggest that there is an incentive to abuse either paying or non-paying business customers. • It is argued that market power makes the conclusions from a competitive model inapplicable. However, in a world in which users multi-home across platforms, the notion that businesses have to bargain with platform monopsonies is dubious. Multi-homing costs vary by platform, but studies suggest that multi-homing prevails across a range of platforms. • The other objection, that users are imperfectly informed, is difficult to test because users will not know ex ante what results they would like. However, if results were consistently unsatisfactory one would expect an erosion of the platform’s user base over time. Markets may not be informationally efficient at any point in time, but they are dynamically efficient: user information improves over time. The status quo isn’t dire enough to warrant most of the interventions proposed in the EC IA (options 1-3). Furthermore, market abuse can readily be addressed by ex post antitrust intervention, which poses less of a threat to dynamic innovation than ex ante regulation. There may be scope for more information and transparency from platforms. At this stage, it’s appropriate to give them the opportunity to craft standards which address the concerns raised by the Commission, whilst minimising the compliance and other costs that will inevitably be passed on to users.
Read full response