Every Commission for thirty years has promised to complete the Single Market. None has. The usual explanation is a shortage of political will. A report published in July by the Brussels think tank EPIC, The Cost of Single Market Fragmentation: What We Know, What We Don't, and What We Need to Measure, offers a more precise diagnosis. The problem is not will. It is arithmetic.
The report puts it in one sentence: the benefits of integration are diffuse, cross-border and long-term, while the benefits of national protection are local, immediate and politically organised. That asymmetry, rather than any particular barrier, is why the market stalls.
EPIC's review of four decades of evidence starts with what the Single Market already delivers. Using estimates by Mion and Ponattu from 2019, it puts the welfare gain at roughly €840 per EU citizen per year, or about €427 billion across the bloc. A separate 2019 study by in 't Veld found EU GDP would be 8 to 9 per cent lower without the market at all.
Those are large numbers spread thinly. €840 a year does not show up on a payslip, is not credited to any minister, and is not lost visibly if a new barrier appears. A protected contract, subsidy or licensing rule, by contrast, has a name attached to it: a firm, a region, a trade association, a constituency. The gains from integration have no lobby; the gains from protection have several.
Public procurement is EPIC's clearest example. The rules have been harmonised for decades, yet a 2020 study by Herz and Varela-Irimia, cited in the report, found domestic firms remain over 900 times more likely to win public contracts than bidders from another member state. EPIC's phrase for this is that legal integration is not market integration. The law was changed; the incentives were not.
EPIC's central recommendation follows from the diagnosis. If the case for completing the market is invisible because its benefits are diffuse, the fix is to make them visible. The 1988 Cecchini Report did exactly that, putting the cost of "non-Europe" at around ECU 200 billion, about 5 per cent of Community GDP, and giving the 1992 programme a figure politicians could defend. Nothing equivalent has been produced since. Existing completion estimates, such as the European Parliament Research Service's €615 billion (2017) or its €297 billion for services alone (2019), use different baselines and have never been consolidated.
The report proposes a steering group to produce a Cecchini-style sequel, The Benefits of Completing the Single Market, with defined workstreams on services, goods, procurement, territorial supply constraints and administrative burden. The point is not academic. A single credible number would give the diffuse side of the ledger the same visibility the concentrated side already has.
The same logic now operates in Brussels itself. The Commission's Industrial Accelerator Act, presented in March, channels public spending toward European-made products in strategic sectors, and Industry Commissioner Stéphane Séjourné has been arguing for a stronger "Made in Europe" preference in public procurement, with a further procurement package expected this week. The case for it is real: reciprocity, resilience, strategic autonomy.
But the structure is familiar. European preference delivers concentrated, immediate benefits to identifiable European producers. Its costs, in higher prices for public buyers and weaker competitive pressure, are spread across every taxpayer and never itemised. That is the domestic-protection asymmetry, scaled up. EPIC does not argue that a European preference is wrong. It argues that nobody has measured what it costs, and that until the benefits of openness are counted with the same care as the benefits of preference, the decision is being made on half a ledger.
The Letta Report of 2024 said what completing the Single Market requires, and the Commission's 2025 Single Market Strategy named the barriers. EPIC's contribution is to explain why knowing the answer has never been enough. Diffuse gains lose to concentrated ones unless someone puts a number on them and repeats it until it sticks. That is a job for the Commission and the Parliament, not a think tank, and the July report is essentially an invitation to take it up. With the next Multiannual Financial Framework in negotiation and European preference rising up the agenda, the price of leaving the ledger half-filled is about to go up.
