Washington: US and EU trade representatives ended another “challenging” round of talks and hard work still lies ahead, the chief US negotiator Dan Mullaney said. Bringing together the world’s largest free trade agreement “will require a lot of creativity and a lot of persistence,” Mullaney told reporters.
His EU counterpart, Ignacio Garcia-Bercero, underlined that the goal was “highly ambitious” but that progress had been made through “intensive” discussions last week on labour, environment and sustainable development issues.
The US-EU talks on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership aim to grow what is already the world’s biggest trade relationship by dismantling regulatory barriers that force companies to produce different products for the US and EU markets.
The toughest areas of dispute are financial regulation, which the US does not want to include in the deal, and a special extrajudicial mechanism to settle investor-state disputes.
The latter has met growing opposition from European civic groups and the German government. Garcia-Bercero sought to reassure that the EU “in no way” intended to “weaken financial services regulations or interfere with work being done.” US financial officials have repeatedly pushed the EU to tighten its banking regulations, in light of the rolling bailouts that undermined economic growth across Europe in recent years. QNA
