When Mario Draghi presented his report on European competitiveness to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on 17 September 2024, he reduced the EU's options to three. “Europe faces a choice between paralysis, exit or integration,” he said. “Exit has been tried and has not delivered… Paralysis is becoming untenable… So, integration is our only hope left.” He was blunter still about the single market itself: “If one objects to building a true Single Market, to capital market integration, and objects to debt issuance, one objects to our EU objectives.”
Nearly two years on, a Brussels think tank has put its finger on an awkward gap in that argument. Europe keeps being told to complete its single market. It has never been told what completing it is worth.
That is the central claim of The Cost of Single Market Fragmentation, a report published in July 2026 by the European Policy Innovation Council (EPIC). Reviewing roughly four decades of economic evidence, EPIC finds that researchers have measured two things well: what the single market currently delivers, and what dismantling it would cost. What no one has produced is a rigorous, headline estimate of the upside of finishing the job — closing the remaining gaps in services, professional qualifications, procurement and regulatory divergence.
The figures that do exist are striking on their own. One widely cited study (Mion & Ponattu, 2019) put the welfare gains from the single market at about €840 per EU citizen every year — roughly €427 billion across the bloc. Another (in 't Veld, 2019) estimated that without the single market, EU GDP would be 8–9 percent lower. On the upside, the European Parliament's own research service has offered completion-gain estimates ranging from €651 billion to €1.1 trillion a year (2014) down to €615 billion (2017), with services alone worth an estimated €297 billion (2019). EPIC's reading of the literature suggests a plausible central range of 4–5 percent of EU GDP — but stresses this is an inference stitched from mismatched studies, not a single, defensible measurement.
The report's sharpest illustration is public procurement — an area legally opened to cross-border competition for decades. Even there, EPIC notes, local firms remain more than 900 times more likely to win a contract than foreign bidders (Herz & Varela-Irimia, 2020). “Legal integration is not market integration,” as the report puts it: the rulebook can be harmonised while the market stays stubbornly national. That gap between statute and reality is exactly what a completion figure would expose — and what its absence keeps comfortably vague.
EPIC's proposed fix is historical. In 1988, the Cecchini Report measured the “cost of non-Europe” at around 200 billion European currency units, roughly 5 percent of Community GDP at the time. That single number gave the 1992 single-market programme its political force. EPIC wants a modern sequel — a new, Cecchini-style study, The Benefits of Completing the Single Market, built on defined workstreams for services and regulated professions, goods and regulatory heterogeneity, public procurement, territorial supply constraints and administrative burden. The 2024 Letta report said what completion requires; the Commission's 2025 Single Market Strategy named the barriers. What is still missing, EPIC argues, is the number that makes completion rational.
This is not an academic quibble. EPIC's own Draghi Implementation Index — its separate tracker of how many of the report's 383 recommendations have become binding law — has consistently found single-market and capital-markets reforms among the weakest performers on delivery, even as defence and security measures race ahead. The pattern is not a coincidence. As the report's political-economy line puts it, “the benefits of integration are diffuse, cross-border and long-term; the benefits of national protection are local, immediate and politically organised.” A hard number for the prize would not settle that fight, but it would change its terms — giving the diffuse, long-term case a figure to rally behind, the way Cecchini's did a generation ago. Until someone produces it, “complete the single market” remains the EU's most repeated instruction and its least quantified one.
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