assessment of third-country subsidies in public procurement contracts. The European Commission should be exclusively responsible for evaluation and decision-making. This would ensure the coherence of decisions and also enable synergy effects through the expertise of the European Commission in state aid law. In addition to the proposed preventive control – i.e., the ex-ante control of individual, specific public procurement contracts – it should also be possible to look retrospectively at the general conditions of competition in procurement markets with regard to the extent to which they are influenced by thirdcountry subsidies. Specific measures, such as the issuance of guidance or recommendations, should also be provided for. If a subsequent analysis shows that a specific company receiving third-country subsidies has repeatedly negatively influenced competition among bidders, it should also be possible to exclude this company from future public procurement contracts. Moreover, we propose a special presumption in the scope of application of the third module: Companies from countries that have neither signed the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement nor a free trade agreement with the EU containing provisions on public procurement should be presumed to receive competition-distorting third-country subsidies in case of participation in public procurement in the EU.
Anti-Coercion Instrument In September 2020, the President of the European Commission sent a letter of intent to the President of the European Parliament and the German Council Presidency outlining the Commission's work plan for 2021. In the context of a newly strengthened economy, an "instrument to deter and counteract coercive actions by third countries" was mentioned.7 Extraterritorial sanctions, but also measures against European companies abroad or tariff barriers against imports from the EU, are now increasingly economic symptoms as a result of the economic manifestation of geopolitical disputes. German industry welcomes the plan to counter this trend by creating a reactive instrument to deter and counteract geo-economic measures. Geo-economics is understood here as the pursuit of geopolitical goals by economic means.8 Status quo This overlapping of political and economic relations is not new, but incidents are becoming more frequent. Just a few years ago, it was taken for granted that the economic interests of EU Member States and their foreign policy goals could be separated clearly. Accordingly, the European Union's options for deterring economic coercion and responding with its own measures have, so far, been very limited. To date, only the anti-boycott regulation, also known as the blocking statute, exists as a procedure to ward off extraterritorial influence of third countries on European companies.
Ursula von der Leyen, Maroš Šefčovič, State of the Union – Letter of Intent to President David Maria Sassoli and to Chancellor Merkel, 16 September 2020, <https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/state_of_the_union_2020_letter_of_intent_en.pdf>. 8 Geopolitics and geo-economics are increasingly used as concepts. Often, there is a lack of analytical separation of the concepts that describes intelligibly how they relate to each other. Without this separation, however, it remains unclear how the intertwining of international politics and global economics creates negative externalities for economic operators. A common definition of geo-economics that is clearly distinguishable from geopolitics comes from Robert D. Blackwill, Jenniver M. Harris, „War by Other Means, Geoeconomics and Statecraft“, Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Havard University Press, p. 20: „The use of economic instruments to promote and defend national interests, and to produce beneficial geopolitical results; and the effects of other nations’ economic actions on a country’s geopolitical goals.” 7
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