INTERNATIONAL TRADE : Changes in European Market Expected to Shape Global Future

Orange County businesses intent on playing in the European market must shift gears rapidly as tremors caused by events unfolding in Europe will trigger changes in other global markets.

At least that’s the word from Frans Andriessen, vice president of the European Communities Commission responsible for external relations and trade policy. “You need to hurry to catch up with the dynamics of economic changes in the community and Eastern Europe,” Andriessen told the World Trade Center Assn. of Orange County this week. “The European (Economic) Community will be the next economic giant in the next decade and into the future.”

With the 12 nations of the EEC intending to unify their economies by 1992, the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, has issued an increasing number of new laws and regulations that will change the economic landscape of Europe in the next century, Andriessen said. Liberalization of the financial markets will ease the flow of capital starting in July, and a freer movement of goods and services within the EEC will significantly boost economic activities within the economic bloc, he added.

Andriessen waved aside fears that the EEC may shut out U.S. companies without manufacturing facilities in Western Europe already. He said the EEC laws are intended to simplify a plethora of standards of member states, making it easier to do business with Western European nations as a single economic bloc.

By the mid-1990s, U.S. companies exporting a product to the Netherlands can easily sell the same type of product to any EEC member state, much like California-based companies can sell their wares to other firms in the United States, he said.

Pointing to the importance of the European market, Andriessen said U.S. exports to the EEC in 1989 totaled $80 billion, 30% of which came from California-based companies.