CETA and TTIP are becoming victims of election campaigns

Czech Confederation of Industry welcomes the fact that the European negotiators succeeded in completing an ambitious free trade agreement with Canada. This agreement will, among other things, allow Czech companies to bid for public contracts in the Canadian provinces and will remove a variety of tariff and non-tariff barriers to mutual trade. We fully support the decision of the Czech government to sign the CETA agreement on 27 October at the EU-Canada summit in Brussels. We would welcome if as many of CETAs provisions as possible would come into effect provisionally from next year, even before the agreement is ratified by all EU Member States.

We also support, together with all members of BusinessEurope, the conclusion of the TTIP negotiations in the shortest possible time. According to our studies TTIP could potentially result in an increase of 0.5% of the EU GDP, strengthen the European economic recovery and expand the choice and lower the prices of goods and services available on the EU market.