This week, from the same people who brought you economic ruin, we have more of the same. As I have said before, deregulation and liberalisation - those twin modern marvels which most agree to have been the motors of our current economic crisis - are still fixed in our rulers’ heads, as if everything will come right if we just keep on taking larger doses of the same medicine.

The European Commission, through its Internal Market Directorate, published a long-awaited report on reserved activities, including in the field of legal services. This is one of those reports which they didn’t bother to tell the legal profession about in advance of, or even during, its commissioning (we found out about it by chance), and of course it was drawn up by consultants - the Centre for Strategy & Evaluation Services, established by former Ernst & Young staff, who offer services in 'development of strategies, evaluation and impact assessment, corporate location'. This is truly a story of the modern world.

The study did not cover the legal profession alone. The study’s aims were to look at professional qualifications in three sectors, construction, business services and tourism, across 13 member states, including the UK. They defined reserved activity as ‘any requirement reserving the exercise of a service activity to the holders of a specific professional qualification’.

As for the reason for the study, you need not ask: economic efficiency, of course! Or, as they put it: ‘The reserve of activities to holders of a specific professional qualification has frequently been mentioned as a barrier to the effective functioning of the single market in the provision of cross-border services.'

There are interesting facts in the report. For instance, there are currently about 800 different regulated professions in the European Union that have been reserved to individual professionals or those holding specific qualifications. Numbers of regulated professions vary greatly, from a high of 55 in Germany to a low of 16 in Finland, the familiar liberal north of Europe.

In fact, the usual north-south divide, a cliché of such studies, was found everywhere: there was strong recourse to exclusive reserved activities in southern countries - and also in the new member states - while northern countries had low numbers. Altogether, 481 reserved activities were identified. The greatest number of exclusive reserved activities was identified in... the legal services sector, followed by engineering, architecture and surveying.

The Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) is still considering its response to the study. My own preliminary comment would be to ask how much the commission paid for it. After all the months of researching, here are the two principal conclusions for legal services (my italics, and where ‘RA’ means reserved activities):

First, 'Possible relationships were identified in some EU countries between the presence of reserves of activities and variables such as enterprise size and the number of legal professionals... For example, Denmark, Slovenia and the Netherlands have a low level of market restrictiveness (ranked 1st, 3rd and 5th respectively in the RA Index), but there are in these countries a high number of legal professionals per capita.'

Second, 'member states with a low level of market restrictiveness due to RAs, such as Finland and the UK tended to have a higher proportion of medium and large-sized legal services firms than mid-ranked countries on the RA index, such as Italy. However, other factors within legal services, such as rules on business and ownership structure and cultural factors will also influence average enterprise size and the extent of industry consolidation. Reserves of activities are only one factor among wider market entry and conduct barriers.'

And so we come to a conclusion: 'Although the economic analysis provides some interesting results, based on the available data, it does not show that there is a clear impact of reserved activities on economic performance for the three sectors examined.'

It looks like we’re back where we started. Our political masters with their medicine spoons will have to find other consultants who specialise in corporate location to dig up reasons for deregulation and liberalisation of the legal services market. In the meanwhile, how much did it cost?

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents about one million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs