• Analyze in a detailed manner the Single European Market and EU's overall context for business, understanding its complexity and changing nature.
• Compare, evaluate and discuss the different situations in which European businesses might find themselves when operating in the Single European Market and in external markets related to EU trade agreements.
• Be able to critically and thoroughly define the opportunities and challenges for European businesses in situations of new market openings.
• Identify the business dilemmas and problems, as well as potential for value creation, that might emerge as a result of changes/frameworks defined in the context of the European Union policies.
• Formulate and answer analytical questions on the basis of the learning goals above.

The course provides an in-depth focus on the European Union context for European business development. The European Union regulates and decides on a wide range of areas directly related to the daily issues for business. These EU regulations and decisions have to do with specific developments in the Single European Market and its adjacent policies, here including business in the external markets of EU most relevant trade partners. These EU regulations regulate the limits of business operations as well as new business opportunities in a larger and harmonized market. With a strong focus on business case studies, this advanced course gives the students factual knowledge about the EU policy context for business, and concrete examples of business challenges, dilemmas, opportunities or paradoxes, directly related to the EU context.

This course builds up from the previous course in the 1rst semester “European Business Framework” (EBF), in two essential ways. Firstly, whereas the EBF course gave a very general introduction about the history of the European Union, about the main institutions of the European Union, and about some of the European Union policies; the current course assumes the students have this basic knowledge, and takes an advanced approach and deeper look into 5 core topics that are relevant for business: free movement of goods and capital; labour market mobility and principles associated to freedom of movement of workers; competition policy; external trade; and single currency. After refreshing briefly the basics, the students will be presented with more advanced concepts and detailed aspects of the EU which are relevant for business. Secondly, and very importantly too, this is an advanced course that uses a case-based teaching method. This pedagogical method allows the students to learn about the complexity of real-life business situations in the European Union, and to be actively engaged in their own learning process by using the new concepts of this course into the analysis of the cases.