Bennett hails 'barrier-free' pact

By Suzanne Struglinski
Deseret Morning News
Published: Tuesday, May 1, 2007 12:08 a.m. MDT
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WASHINGTON — President Bush signed an agreement Monday that will help the United States and the European Union move to what Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, calls a "barrier-free trans-Atlantic market."

As part of the EU-U.S. Summit at the White House Monday, Bush, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso signed an agreement to strengthen trans-Atlantic commerce by getting rid of some regulatory inconsistencies.

By approving what Bennett calls the "Merkel Initiative," regulations will be improved not only between European Union countries and the United States but also worldwide.

"If we do in fact get some regulatory resolution between the European standards and the American standards, we create a momentum that will flow throughout the rest of the world," Bennett said Monday at the National Press Club. "If you want to sell on a worldwide basis, you're going to have to make your product comply with those standards."

Bennett said the EU and the U.S. make up more than half of the gross domestic product, so consistency in regulations would create a "de facto world standard."

"We may look back on this and say that the Merkel Initiative was one of the most significant things that affected world trade and did so in a very quiet sort of way," Bennett said.

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Bennett, along with other members of Congress, attended the German Marshall Fund's Brussels Forum in Belgium over the weekend, where it was stressed this was not a free-trade agreement, he said. Free-trade agreements involve tariffs, while this agreement focuses on regulations that are different on each side of the Atlantic. Bennett is chairman of the Transatlantic Policy Network, an organization dedicated to strengthening the relationship between the United States and Europe.

Bennett uses a car as an example. Manufacturers have to crash a car twice to adhere to differences between American and European safety standards, even though cars are not particularly safer on one side of the Atlantic or the other. He said regulation should protect consumers but also should not be adopted just "for regulation's sake."

The goal is to get the barriers down by 25 percent by 2015, although Bennett admitted he did not know how exactly that would be measured.

"It is a statement of the importance of trade," Bush said Monday. "It is a commitment to eliminating barriers to trade. It is a recognition that the closer that the United States and the EU become, the better off our people become. So this is a substantial agreement, and I appreciate it."

The Transatlantic Policy Network estimates that eliminating obstacles to trans-Atlantic business would boost Americans' per capita income by 2.5 percent and Europeans' by up to 3 percent, according to the plan.

E-mail: suzanne@desnews.com

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