The ‘One Europe, One Market Roadmap’, signed in Limassol in April 2026 by the European Parliament, Commission and Council marks an important shift towards a more coordinated and operational approach to deepening the EU single market. For the first time, the three EU institutions jointly committed to a concrete legislative timetable, supported by a quarterly accountability mechanism.
Yet the Roadmap should be seen as a starting point. The persistent underperformance of the digital single market is not primarily a problem of legislative ambition. It’s structural. The EU now has a broad and growing body of digital legislation in force, but its cumulative effect has often been to add compliance layers rather than reduce fragmentation. Digital firms still face divergent national implementation, overlapping supervisory structures and differing interpretations of shared concepts across Member States.
Without a fully integrated home market, European firms cannot achieve the scale required for global competitiveness. Similarly, unless capital market fragmentation is addressed in parallel with regulatory reforms, new instruments such as the Scaleup Europe Fund and the 28th regime risk remaining underutilised due to insufficient market depth.
This report and its recommendations are based on an analysis of 15 key studies and reports on the state of the digital single market published between 2023 and 2026.
Ten key bottlenecks were identified based on their significance for the digital single market’s functioning and, importantly, on their potential to be addressed through concrete policy, regulatory or market-driven actions.
Reijo Arnio and Tiina Vainio from SITRA, and Paul Timmers were also co-authors of this study.
This report is the result of an equal collaboration between CEPS and SITRA.
