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Apr 19, 2016

TRUCKERS' NIGHTMARE * Europe: New checks and Permanent curbs

* Italy / Germany / Hungary - Three decades of borderless travel at risk. Could cost 470 billion euros over 10 years

... Crawls along in a line of vehicles approaching the Austria-Germany border. After more than eight hours carrying fan parts, hungarian trucker Unczorg has no more patience for delays. And this day was better than usual. He’s had to endure waits of about four hours at this checkpoint, set up last September to hunt for migrants on the A3 highway near the German city of Passau. It’s a route he plies daily for electric-motor maker EBM-Papst Group... What infuriates Unczorg may herald a sea change for Europe’s economy, business and even society: the erosion of a decades-old system that has allowed borderless travel across 26 countries. Bringing back widespread controls would be a blow for the most visible - or invisible - victory in the 60-year quest for a united Europe, conceived in the rubble of World War II... 

 Now, Germany, Austria, France and Sweden, among others, have reintroduced border checkpoints in some places. They are pressured by Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II - about 1 million migrants arrived in Greece and Italy in 2015 - terrorist attacks, and the growth of anti-immigration movements. But the economic cost of dumping Schengen, at a time when growth across the continent is still weak, would be massive... A permanent return to border controls could lop 470 billion euros ($530 billion) of gross domestic product growth from the European economy over the next 10 years, based on a relatively conservative assumption of costs, according to research published by Germany’s Bertelsmann Foundation... The economic costs of more controls might ultimately be manageable, says Michala Marcussen, global head of economics at Societe Generale SA in Paris. Political costs are another matter... 
(Photographer: Akos Stiller/Bloomberg - Zoltan Unczorg, a Hungarian truck driver, closes his truck door in the customs zone near the Austrian-German border)   --   Brussels, Belgium - Bloomberg by John Follain, Carolynn Look and Matthew Campbell - 18 April 2016

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