The Internal Market of the European Union with(out) the United Kingdom

After the elimination of all barriers within the free movement of goods in the EU internal market, the European Commission observed many national obstacles to free movement of services, which should be eliminated in accordance with the service directive of 2006. Recently, following the period of fascination with services, we have been hearing more often about the need of reindustrialization in the European Union. As a result of economic crisis, instead of introducing modern solutions that would facilitate the functioning of the EU internal market we witnessed reinforced protectionist and interventionist tendencies. Until today, the United Kingdom has been one of the leaders of liberalization and a strong supporter for new business models within the servitization and the collaborative economy. Thus Brexit would have a substantial impact on both: economy of the EU and Economic Policy of the EU. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to evaluate changes in the contribution of selected manufacturing and service sectors into EU economy and trade (with and without the United Kingdom) in recent years. The available researches show an increasing position of service sectors, especially manufacturing-related services, which, paradoxically, proofs that manufacturing sectors still exist in Europe. It seems that an expansion of the service sector would allow EU entrepreneurs to join servitization, which could improve their competitiveness vis-à-vis third countries. However this process can be considerably disturb after the Brexit.