Four numbers and no answer: what Europe has never measured about its single market

Key takeaways

• EPIC's July 2026 report on the cost of single market fragmentation lists at least four Parliament-commissioned estimates of what finishing the market would be worth, ranging from €297 billion a year for services alone to over €1 trillion. They use different baselines and none of them measures the same thing.
• The one figure Europe does have with confidence is the value of what already exists: about €840 per citizen a year, or €427 billion across the EU (Mion and Ponattu, 2019). The EU has measured what it built, not what it left unbuilt.
• EPIC's central point is that "4–5% of GDP" is an inference stitched from incompatible studies, not a measurement, and that no such number has been produced since Cecchini in 1988.

On Wednesday Ursula von der Leyen will stand in Strasbourg and, if the last two State of the Union speeches are any guide, tell MEPs that completing the single market is Europe's cheapest route to growth. She will almost certainly attach a number to it. What she cannot do, according to a July 2026 report by the Brussels think tank EPIC, is point to a study that actually produced that number.

The report, The Cost of Single Market Fragmentation: What We Know, What We Don't, and What We Need to Measure, reviews roughly four decades of evidence on the single market and reaches a blunt conclusion. Europe has measured what the market delivers. It has measured what dismantling it would cost. It has never measured what completing it would gain, and the figures that circulate in speeches are a patchwork of estimates built on different assumptions and different years.

Four numbers, four baselines

EPIC's inventory of the European Parliament's own research is where the problem shows. The European Parliamentary Research Service put the broad gains from completing the market at between €651 billion and €1.1 trillion a year in 2014, in a study explicitly billed as a return to Cecchini. Three years later, a 2017 EPRS update landed at €615 billion. In 2019 a further paper estimated the untapped potential of services alone at €297 billion. Each is a serious piece of work. Each also starts from a different definition of "complete", a different reference year and a different set of policy areas, which is why they cannot be added, averaged or compared.

The Parliament's most-quoted figure is bigger still. Its 2019 study Europe's two trillion euro dividend estimated that fully implementing the policies Parliament had called for across fifty areas, from a deeper digital market to coordinated defence and tax cooperation, could add over €2.2 trillion to EU output over the decade to 2029, or around 14% of GDP. It is a valuable map of Parliament's agenda. It is not a measurement of the single market, and EPIC's report is careful not to treat it as one.

Set against that scatter is one number Europe can stand behind. Mion and Ponattu's 2019 study for the Bertelsmann Stiftung found the single market generates roughly €840 per EU citizen per year in welfare gains, about €427 billion across the member states. A separate Commission estimate by in 't Veld the same year found EU GDP would be 8–9% lower without the market at all. Both describe the value of the market as it exists. Neither says anything about the value of the parts still missing.

The inference that became a fact

From these fragments, EPIC notes, a "plausible central range" of 4–5% of EU GDP has come to be treated as the prize for completion. The report is explicit that this is an inference, not a measurement. It is also, by coincidence, almost exactly the figure the 1988 Cecchini Report produced for the cost of "non-Europe": around ECU 200 billion, or roughly 5% of Community GDP at the time. That number gave the 1992 programme its political force precisely because it was a single, defended estimate that ministers could not wave away. Nothing comparable has been produced in the thirty-eight years since.

The gap matters because the last two years have produced plenty of diagnosis and no price tag. Enrico Letta's 2024 report set out what completing the market requires. The Commission's 2025 Single Market Strategy named the barriers. EPIC's recommendation is the missing third step: a research steering group to produce a new Cecchini-style report, The Benefits of Completing the Single Market, organised around five measurable workstreams, from services and regulated professions to public procurement and administrative burden.

What This Means

A State of the Union speech is where numbers become slogans, and slogans are cheap when nobody can check them. The reason that matters is political rather than academic. The benefits of integration are diffuse, cross-border and slow; the benefits of national protection are local, immediate and organised. A minister defending a domestic licensing rule can always name the firms it protects. The Commission arguing for its removal can currently offer a range that spans three separate studies and half a trillion euro. Until somebody produces a single, defensible figure for what completion is worth, the speeches will keep citing one, and the member states will keep ignoring it. Von der Leyen can announce the study on Wednesday. She cannot yet announce the number.