The Single Market Emergency Instrument proposed by the European Commission, the executive body of the EU, on Monday is a response to bottlenecks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia-Ukraine conflict.

The proposal, which echoes similar measures adopted by the United States and Japan, empowers the Commission to order EU states to re-organize supply chains and increase supplies of crisis-relevant goods as quickly as possible, including expanding or re-purposing existing production capacities or setting up new ones and placing crisis-relevant goods on the market.