UK would be 'shooting itself in the foot' if it left EU, says Pascal Lamy I know from experience that they were the ones that pushed most for getting the Single Market done. Usually Brits are not philanthropists. The reason why they did it was because it was good for them. And there's still more to come - notably in services, where they have a competitive advantage and where the internal market is not more than 60pc of where it could be," he said. Mr Lamy said Britain inside the EU would also be "good for Europe," as the country was "ahead of the curve" in services. "Tapping the EU Single Market and making it work better - we need the UK to do that, because it is good for Europe and because the UK has a know-how in services which would benefit the rest of the Continent," he said. Mr Lamy, a former EU trade commissioner, also said work on rebalancing Britain's economy was not as important as exploiting its strength in services. Mr Lamy, who writes in The Geneva Consensus that services was often considered "the poor relation of globalisation," said: "I think this frontier between goods and services is a thing of the past. For example, is your iPad a form of goods or service? In terms of value added, it's much more a service than goods, and yet it looks like goods, and you would call it a 'thing'. I think traditional concepts on this are obsolete and more and more of our economies are based around services, which create far more jobs. Mr Lamy also said that if Britain left the EU and joined the European Free Trade Association, which includes Norway and Switzerland, it would mean the UK would have "no place at the negotiating table" when it came to shaping Europe. He said Britain faced a choice between being a "designer" of Europe's future or an "environment taker." My Lamy also urged Prime Minister David Cameron to look beyond countries such as China and India to other emerging and pre-emerging markets. Mr Lamy said the so-called "BRICS" of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa were less relevant that other emerging nations. "The numbers are more with Indonesia than Russia, and more with Turkey than South Africa," he said. There is also a whole continent which is pre-emerging - Africa. African growth for the next ten or twenty years is going to be between 5pc and 8pc. When asked if Mr Cameron should be visiting Africa for trade talks, Mr Lamy replied: "of course." My advice in terms in terms of geo-economics and geo-politics is to invest in Africa, because there are fewer people there, and because the risk-premia is decreasing. The Geneva Consensus: Making Trade Work for All is published by Cambridge University Press