In its July 2026 report, The Cost of Single Market Fragmentation, the think tank EPIC makes a deceptively simple observation. Economists have spent four decades measuring two things about Europe's single market: how much it already delivers, and how much would be lost if it were dismantled. What no one has done is measure the upside of finishing it — the gain from removing the barriers that still cut the market in two. That missing number, EPIC argues, is exactly the one that would make the case for reform impossible to ignore.
The figures that do exist are striking on their own. The single market generates around €840 per EU citizen each year — some €427 billion across the bloc (Mion and Ponattu, 2019). Without it, EU GDP would be 8–9% lower (in 't Veld, 2019). But those measure what exists. The prize from completion is scattered across studies with different baselines, and it is largest in one place: services.
Europe is a services economy. Services account for roughly three-quarters of EU output and most of its jobs. Yet the single market barely reaches them. Cross-border services trade inside the EU stands at about 7.6% of GDP — no higher than the EU's services trade with countries outside the bloc, according to recent European Central Bank analysis. Put bluntly: a French firm selling a service in Germany faces roughly the same friction as one selling to a country that isn't in the single market at all.
The barriers are old and familiar — divergent national licensing, professional-qualification rules, administrative hoops — and they have proven remarkably durable. Around 60% of the obstacles to services trade are the same type as they were twenty years ago. A 2019 estimate put the gain from a genuine services market at €297 billion a year (EPRS). Public procurement tells the same story: decades after being legally integrated, local firms are still more than 900 times likelier to win a contract than a foreign bidder (Herz and Varela-Irimia, 2020). As EPIC puts it, legal integration is not market integration.
The politics are the point. As EPIC notes, the benefits of integration are diffuse, cross-border and long-term, while the benefits of national protection are local, immediate and organised. That asymmetry is why the barriers outlive every strategy paper. Mario Draghi made the stakes explicit in his September 2024 competitiveness address in Strasbourg: “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 of the Draghi agenda finds the single market among the weakest areas on delivery.
The Commission's 2025 Single Market Strategy names the ten biggest obstacles and promises a Product Act, a Construction Services Act and a Delivery Act to chip away at them. What it doesn't have, EPIC argues, is the one thing that gave the 1992 single-market push its force: a number. The 1988 Cecchini Report priced the “cost of non-Europe” at roughly 5% of Community GDP, and that figure drove a decade of reform. EPIC wants a modern sequel — a Cecchini report for completion, not just for what already exists.
Europe spends a great deal of energy defending the single market it has and very little quantifying the one it could build. That is not an academic gap. Every debate about competitiveness, about closing the productivity distance with the United States and China, runs through the services market Europe has never bothered to unify. Until someone puts a credible figure on what completion is worth, reform will keep losing to the concrete, local interests that block it — and the single market will keep stopping, as it does now, at the border of its own biggest sector.
