New report calls for a Cecchini-style measurement of the benefits of completing the Single Market — the missing piece between Letta’s blueprint and the Commission’s barrier list.
Brussels, 20.07.2026 — The European Policy Innovation Council (EPIC) today published The Cost of Single Market Fragmentation: What We Know, What We Don’t, and What We Need to Measure — a review of nearly four decades of evidence that ends in an uncomfortable finding: Europe has measured what the Single Market delivers, and what dismantling it would cost, but has never measured what completing it would gain.
The evidence on what exists is solid. The Single Market generates roughly €840 per EU citizen per year in welfare gains — about €427 billion annually across Member States (Mion & Ponattu, 2019). Without it, EU GDP would be 8–9% lower (in ‘t Veld, 2019).
The evidence on completion is another matter. Estimates exist — the European Parliamentary Research Service put broad completion gains at €651 billion to €1.1 trillion per year (2014), €615 billion (2017), and services alone at €297 billion (2019) — but they rest on different baselines, different units and different sector coverage. Taken together they suggest a plausible central range of 4–5% of EU GDP. That is an inference from scattered studies, not a measurement. Adding them up would be methodologically wrong: barriers overlap, and a trade-intensity gain is not a GDP gain.
The gap matters politically. The benefits of integration are diffuse, cross-border and long-term; the benefits of national protection are local, immediate and politically organised. In public procurement — legally integrated for decades — local firms remain over 900 times more likely to win contracts than foreign bidders (Herz & Varela-Irimia, 2020). Legal integration is not market integration.
Europe has solved this problem before. In 1988, the Cecchini Report measured the cost of “non-Europe” at around ECU 200 billion — about 5% of Community GDP — and that number gave the 1992 Single Market programme its economic force. Measurement made integration a rational choice for Member States.
EPIC’s central recommendation: convene a research steering group to produce a new Cecchini-style report, The Benefits of Completing the Single Market. It would work in defined workstreams — services and regulated professions, goods and regulatory heterogeneity, public procurement, territorial supply constraints, and administrative burden — combining firm surveys, gravity modelling and general-equilibrium modelling into a defensible range rather than a false-precision headline.
The Letta Report (2024) told Europe what completing the Single Market requires. The Commission’s Single Market Strategy (2025) named the barriers. What is missing is the number that makes completion rational.
The two strands of EPIC’s competitiveness work reinforce each other. EPIC’s July 2026 Draghi Implementation Index update found that the EU moves fastest where competitiveness fuses with security and slowest on the structural reforms that force market outcomes — with deeper Single Market integration among the weakest areas of delivery. Fragmentation is not a side issue; it is where the competitiveness agenda is stalling.
”“Member States are not against the Single Market; they are against paying local political costs for diffuse European gains. Cecchini showed that a
Dr. Antonios NestorasFounding Director, EPIC
credible number changes that calculation — it is time to produce that number for
completion.”
