‘Europe faces a choice between paralysis, exit or integration,’ Mario Draghi told the European Parliament in September 2024. ‘Exit has been tried and has not delivered… Paralysis is becoming untenable… So, integration is our only hope left.’ Nearly two years on, a new report from EPIC, the Brussels-based research institute, points to an awkward hole in that argument: Europe has never actually measured what deeper integration of its single market is worth.
The report — The Cost of Single Market Fragmentation: What We Know, What We Don’t, and What We Need to Measure, published in July 2026 — reviews nearly four decades of economic evidence. Its conclusion is that the EU has answered two of the three questions that matter, and ignored the most useful one.
The first question — what does the single market already deliver? — has an answer. Integration generates roughly €840 per EU citizen every year, about €427 billion across the bloc, according to a 2019 study by Mion and Ponattu. The second — what would we lose by dismantling it? — also has one: EU GDP would be 8 to 9% lower without the single market, according to work by in ’t Veld, also from 2019.
The third question is the blank. No one has rigorously measured what the EU would gain by completing the single market — closing the gaps in services, professional qualifications, procurement and regulation that still split it into 27 pieces. Estimates float around, built on different baselines and methods: European Parliament researchers have put completion gains anywhere from €615 billion to over €1 trillion a year, and services alone at €297 billion. But those are inferences stitched together from scattered studies, not a measurement. EPIC’s point is that the most decision-relevant number in European economics does not exist.
This is not an academic quibble, and history shows why. In 1988, the Cecchini Report priced the ‘cost of non-Europe’ — the price of leaving the common market unfinished — at around 200 billion ECU, roughly 5% of the Community’s GDP at the time. That figure did political work. It gave the 1992 single-market programme a concrete target and a vivid sense of money left on the table, and it helped push through the biggest wave of market integration in the EU’s history.
Today there is no equivalent. The Letta report of 2024 described what completing the single market would require. The Commission’s 2025 Single Market Strategy named the barriers. What neither produced is the Cecchini-style number that would make finishing the job feel not merely worthy but rational — the figure a finance minister could hold up to justify the political cost of prising open a protected national market.
The distance between the single market on paper and in practice is easiest to see in public procurement, an area legally integrated for decades. Even so, local firms remain more than 900 times more likely to win a public contract than bidders from another member state, according to a 2020 study by Herz and Varela-Irimia. As EPIC puts it, legal integration is not market integration. The rules say the market is open; the outcomes say it is not.
The reason the gaps persist is political economy, and EPIC states it plainly: the benefits of integration are diffuse, cross-border and long-term, while the benefits of national protection are local, immediate and politically organised. A sheltered haulier, notary or construction firm knows exactly what it stands to lose from an open market. The consumer who would gain a few euros never learns what they were denied.
EPIC’s recommendation is deliberately unglamorous: convene a research steering group to produce a modern Cecchini report — The Benefits of Completing the Single Market — with defined workstreams for services, goods, procurement and administrative burden. It sounds like a call for yet more studies. It is really a bet that Europe’s integration debate keeps stalling because the upside has never been priced. Draghi framed the choice as integration or decline. But politicians do not act on choices; they act on numbers. Until someone puts a credible figure on what finishing the single market is worth, ‘integration is our only hope’ will keep losing, quietly, to the haulier who knows precisely what he would lose.
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