Large French companies have welcomed the relaxation of trade tensions between the EU and the United States as well as the rebound in transatlantic cooperation that occurred in 2021, especially with the official launch of the Trade and Technology Council at the occasion of the Pittsburgh Meeting last September.
With a view to fueling bilateral discussions within the TTC working groups, French companies have listed their priorities on the basis of agreed roadmaps for each working group :
- Enhanced regulatory cooperation in the field of emerging technologies to move towards common or interoperable standards, while maintaining the EU regulatory autonomy ;
- Deepened cooperation in the field of environmental technologies with a focus on the standardization of rules on carbon content measurement and the coordination on border carbon taxation, as well as research and development in several priority sectors ;
- Coordination in the management of strategic value chains ( identification of priority value chains, information sharing, and even possibly cooperation schemes in terms of sourcing and production lines, subject to legal guarantees)
- Discussions towards common reference frameworks for the security of digital infrastructures and cooperation in the operational rollout of new generation networks while preserving the EU autonomy in the decision-making process ;
- Deepened discussions on competition-related regulatory frameworks for digital platforms and on data flows ;
- Discussions towards common analytical frameworks and information sharing in the field of export control, foreign direct investment screening and trade defense against the distortive practices by third countries, without an systematic alignment of the EU on US positions;
- Bilateral cooperation on how better include sustainable development objective in the EU and US respective trade policies, especially with regard to climate change mitigation and other environmental common goods’ protection ;