European Commission signs its first dedicated digital trade agreement with Singapore

Brussels – Fifty-five percent of trade between the EU and Singapore is in digital format. That’s why Brussels chose the island south of Malaysia to sign its first digital trade agreement, which complements the free trade agreement the two partners signed in 2019. Announcing this, European Commission Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis and Singapore’s Minister for Trade Relations Grace Fu.

The two claimed the crucial role of the EU and Singapore in defining high-level, legally binding digital business standards. As already demonstrated in Brussels, by the entry into force in February of the EU Digital Services Act (DSA). The agreement with Singapore will further link the two economies and provide binding rules to build consumer trust, ensure predictability and legal certainty for businesses, and remove and prevent the emergence of unjustified barriers to digital trade. 

While specific chapters on digital trade were in the recent free trade agreements with the UK, Chile, and New Zealand, the one with Singapore will be the first entirely dedicated to the digital market, although a “natural extension” – as Grace Fu called it – of the free trade agreement already in place.

The European Union is the world’s leading importer and exporter of digital services. In 2022, 55 percent of the EU’s total trade in services was delivered digitally, representing more than 1.3 trillion euros of the bloc’s imports and exports. “Establishing smart and modern rules for digital trade with our global partners is crucial at a time when more than half of the EU’s trade in services is done digitally,” Ursula von der Leyen’s deputy told a press conference.

Coinciding with the Digital Trade Agreement announcement, Fu and Dombrovskis co-chaired the second meeting of the Trade Committee under the EU-Singapore Free Trade Agreement. The two partners have “strong and enduring” trade relations, as evidenced by annual trade in goods and services of more than 130 billion. After acknowledging good bilateral cooperation in the FTA’s smooth implementation and effective functioning, Dombrovskis and Fu discussed ways to strengthen cooperation in forward-looking trade areas, particularly in everything related to the green economy.