Services and the single market

The single market programme of the EU covers services as one of the four fundamental freedoms. While the legislative effort has been impressive and positive results evident in areas such as mobile telephony and low cost air transport, the impact on many services has been weak as yet. This holds in particular true for a group of services that share specific characteristics such as the overriding importance of quality, the existence of asymmetric information and the need to produce in a tailor-made way. The combination of these characteristics and trends such as globalisation, the usage of ICT and enlargement, calls for a fresh view on the functioning of the single market. An effective future single market is based on a bottom up approach, integrating single market policies with other policies, starting from the functioning of national markets and being less uniform in nature.