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Comment by vanrohan | Hacker News Reader

Great to see a directory like this starting to include physical products. I'd be interested in having some extra datapoints to help with decision making:

- How much of the product/company's supply chain is in EU (to get an idea of just how European the product is, is it made here or abroad)

- Some way to show if the company is paying "fair" tax in EU (or are profits shifted abroad)

These are difficult datapoints to get, but I wonder if there can be some sort of "community notes" where this data can be crowd sourced and updated on the directory.

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It might be worth noting that this is not specific to the EU, it's the whole of Europe. So for example it includes companies from Norway, Switerzland and the UK.

So asking how much tax is paid or how much supply chain is in the EU doesn't necissarily make sense here.

Im not particularly fussy if it's EU or European. The idea is more to get insight if it's just a dropshipper/reseller type of business, or involved in regional manufacturing.

Substitute EU with EU+norway/switzerland/UK/etc

The idea is whether the company has some loophole where the profits are registered in some offshore island in order to avoid taxes, as well as how big part of the product is actually made in europe as opposed as in X non-european country. I have seen a lot of products advertised as being products of the native country when they are actually rebranded chinese products or whatever (I have no issue with chinese products, but if the point is to know which products are european products this is important information).

In this case, "in the EU" is a shorthand for "in the single market", "in the customs union", or "in the EEA (plus Switzerland)".

High-level discussions rarely go down to this level of detail, and from the point of view of the consumers it is not very relevant. What matters is coupling with the US or China, and the relevant regulations.

> In this case, "in the EU" is a shorthand for "in the single market", "in the customs union", or "in the EEA (plus Switzerland)".

No it isn’t because the UK is not in the EEA or the single market.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area

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