There are two main types of NTBs: the first one consists of direct price influencers, such as export subsidies or drawbacks, countervailing and anti-dumping duties, exchange rate manipulations, methods of imports valuation, customs surcharges, lengthy customs procedures, sanitary regulations, establishment of minimum import prices, unreasonable standards and inspection procedures.

29. Urges the Commission is its Review of Directive 89/105/EEC relating to 'the transparency of measures regulating the pricing of medicinal products for human use and their inclusion in the scope of national health insurance systems' to ensure that this is consistent with the objective of establishing the EU as the home of a globally dominant pharmaceutical industry with the consequent benefits for investment and high-skilled job creation, and particularly to move away from a top-down focus on regulation and pricing that merely discourages competition;

Long-term access contracts would be priced at a lower level per access line than short term access contracts.

It may strike you as unusual that, whilst I, as a Liberal, am vehemently opposed to interference in consumer rates, certainly in the free market, where the Commission and Parliament claim that conditional competition leads to a better price and more innovation, I will be voting in favour of this in order that we may be able to do something about consumer prices.

In the euro zone, price stability is a reality; in quite a few sectors, indeed, aggregate rates of price increase below two per cent are opening the door to deflation, but as soon as there is the slightest indication of economic recovery in the euro zone, the only way the ECB, with its blind fixation on price stability, knows how to respond is by raising interest rates.

The compensation system proposed by the Commission should be replaced by a more practical one, based on real price structures (see amendment by Michael Cramer to Annex II.)