The state of EU the single market: a needed relaunch. Taking stock of the remaining challenges

The integration of the European economies through the completion of the single or internal market (IM) is one of the most solid pillars of the European policy-making. Nevertheless, near twenty years after the «1992» IM programme, the IM still presents shadows in its performance as well as areas to be completed that had prevented the IM to exploit all its potential for enhancing competitiveness and growth in Europe, in spite of the undeniable micro and macro-economic positive results already achieved. These weaknesses and «missing links», together with the new economic and political context (economic crisis and arrival of the new Commission, which has just launched the new Strategy for European growth «Europe 2020») have moved in 2010 to a process of political relaunching of the IM, called to culminate in 2012, surrounded by a much more complex and less favourable to integration context than the situation prevailing in 1985 when the «1992» programme was launched.