Here is a figure that should unsettle anyone who believes the European single market is finished business: a company bidding for a public contract in its own country is more than 900 times likelier to win it than a company bidding from another EU member state. That number, drawn from a 2020 study by economists Herz and Varela-Irimia, sits at the heart of a July 2026 report by the Brussels research initiative EPIC, The Cost of Single Market Fragmentation. Public procurement has been legally integrated across the EU for decades. In practice, it remains stubbornly national.
That phrase captures the puzzle. On paper, a Portuguese firm can bid for a contract in Finland as easily as a Finnish one. The directives exist; the tender portals exist. Yet the market barely moves across borders. Between 2016 and 2019, only around 7% of EU contracting authorities received even one foreign bid, according to analysis of the bloc's procurement data. The obstacles are not usually crude protectionism at the moment of awarding a contract. They are quieter: language, unfamiliarity, the cost of learning a foreign system, and the fact that each of the 27 members layers its own thresholds, deadlines, procedures and appeal channels on top of the common EU rules. Knowing the EU directive is not enough; you must know 27 national rulebooks.
EPIC's broader point is that procurement is just one symptom of a market Europe has never truly completed — and, more strikingly, never properly measured. Europe knows roughly what the single market already delivers: one widely cited estimate (Mion and Ponattu, 2019) puts the gain at about €840 per citizen a year, or €427 billion across the bloc. It knows roughly what dismantling it would cost: EU GDP would be an estimated 8–9% lower without it. What no one has rigorously calculated is what completing the single market would be worth. Scattered estimates exist — the European Parliament's research service once valued services-market completion alone at €297 billion a year — but they rest on different baselines and assumptions. There is no authoritative figure.
EPIC wants to change that. In 1988, the Cecchini Report measured the "cost of non-Europe" at around ECU 200 billion, roughly 5% of the Community's GDP at the time. That single, credible number gave the 1992 single-market programme its political force — it made completion feel rational rather than merely virtuous. EPIC argues Europe needs a modern equivalent: a research effort to produce The Benefits of Completing the Single Market, with defined workstreams on services, goods, procurement and administrative burden. The point is not another lament about fragmentation but a hard figure politicians can weigh against the local, immediate and well-organised interests that resist opening up.
The timing is apt. Mario Draghi, presenting his competitiveness report to the European Parliament in September 2024, warned that "if one objects to building a true Single Market, to capital market integration, and objects to debt issuance, one objects to our EU objectives." EPIC's own tracking finds the single market among the areas where the Draghi agenda has moved least. And the Commission is due to propose a revision of the EU's public-procurement framework in 2026 — the first real chance in years to attack exactly the fragmentation the 900-times figure exposes.
The single market is Europe's greatest economic achievement and its most persistent unfinished project. The procurement gap shows why: the barriers that matter now are not tariffs or bans but the thousand small frictions of 27 legal systems, and those are far harder to legislate away than a customs post. EPIC's contribution is to reframe the problem as a measurement failure. Europe cannot make a compelling case for the political pain of deeper integration when it cannot say what the prize is worth. A number would not dissolve the resistance — the beneficiaries of national protection are always more motivated than the diffuse winners of open markets — but it would change the argument. Until someone produces it, "completing the single market" will stay what it has been for thirty years: a slogan everyone supports and no one finishes.
.png)
