ABSTRACT
While the European Union (EU) has always looked upon services as an essential part of the integration process, it has taken some time for the EU to devote much attention to them. In this chapter, the author looks at the European service sector in some detail. He provides a succinct description of the European policy regime. The mix of liberalisation and regulation of the EU had to take into account the fact that major segments of the service sector have been subject to considerable national government regulation. The author also provides a description of the service sector in Europe. He aims to report the results of two case studies of integration. The first one is insurance, for which integration started some time ago. The second one is telecommunications, a branch that is expanding very quickly as a consequence of the development of the information society and is transforming itself very quickly as a result of privatisation and liberalisation.
