Europe, Canada and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement

The Great Recession and the turn towards all forms of protectionism stress the relevance of international trade policy. With the global economy undergoing deep structural changes, the negotiations between Canada and the EU on a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) present a real-time experiment that sheds light on the direction that the relationships between two economic units of the G8 will take. For Canada, an agreement with the EU would end its current dependency on the US; for the EU, an agreement with Canada would be a first with a G8-economy and indicate how its new trade strategy ’Global Europe’ will look like.

This book is the first to simultaneously analyze the undercurrents of this project and introduce the main topics at hand. CETA is much more than a simple free trade agreement, its breadth covers regulatory aspects in goods, services, and finance; the opening of public procurement markets; attitudes and policies of Canadian provinces towards liberalization; climate policies and international leadership claims of the EU in comparison to Canadian policy attempts; the challenges of the Euro project and the reform efforts; and the challenges of the Euro as a international reserve currency.

CETA is a challenging project that will kick-start enormous changes in trade policy-making as well as in market openness in Canada. It will mark the EU’s efforts to re-make the Atlantic Economy. This book provides deep insights into the ambiguity of the project and addresses the implications of a rapidly changing global economy for trade policy. Offering analysis of the financial industry, banking, trade policy, climate change strategy, and the Euro exchange rate, this book should be of interest to students and policy-makers alike.

Kurt Hübner is the Chair for German and European Studies and Director of the Institute for European Studies at The University of British Columbia, Canada, as well as Jean Monnet Chair for European Integration and Global Politics.