Examples of Single Market barriers for businesses – 2025
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European companies cherish the Single Market as the bedrock of the EU economy. A strong and competitive EU industry depends on the full realisation of the EU Single Market and the removal of all barriers to the free movement of goods, services, people, capital and data.
However, companies encounter obstacles and barriers every day when selling products or expanding into another Member State, which hampers competitiveness and slows down companies’ twin transition efforts.
Resolute actions to remove remaining regulatory barriers to the classical Single Market could generate economic benefits of at least €644 billion per year by 2032.
In its priorities for the Single Market beyond 2024, BusinessEurope reiterates its call to remove all regulatory barriers to cross-border business operations and intra-EU investments and prevent new barriers from emerging, forming a fully-fledged Single Market for all economic activities and ensuring that any additional regulation comes with the guarantee to trade and invest freely across the EU without any exceptions. These calls have been furthermore underlined in the 2024 reports of Enrico Letta and Mario Draghi.
In its Single Market strategy published on 21 May 2025, the Commission tackles some of the most pressing Single Market barriers – a promising step forward, which BusinessEurope fully supports.
Together with its member federations, BusinessEurope continues to identify tangible barriers to cross-border business operations, digitalisation bottlenecks, and flaws in administrative cooperation across Member States to understand the remaining bottlenecks and facilitate informed and better decision-making. To build up the evidence, BusinessEurope keeps updating its series of short non-papers showcasing practical issues covering a wide range of different policy areas, including posting of workers, packaging legislation, transport infrastructure and implementation of corporate sustainability due diligence.
The examples linked to this introductory note are not an exhaustive list and would be supplemented by new cases in the coming months.