Regulatory Cooperation in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership

Orgalime calls for progress on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations. The TTIP is a key priority for the European engineering industry, with its objective of formulating a comprehensive, exemplary transatlantic agreement for the liberalisation of trade in products and services. The USA is currently one of the world's larger markets for our industry, and our companies hope that overcoming both tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade will bring about tangible cost benefits.

Additionally, standardisation and conformity assessment procedures should facilitate transatlantic trade, not become technical barriers for both the European and the American engineering industries. Therefore, we support the transatlantic negotiations as a way to improve the technical cooperation by reducing as far as possible the existing differences in the respective regulations. We believe that the alignment with international standards from ISO, IEC and ITU, is the way forward for the removal of technical barriers to trade between the EU and the USA.