Europe’s most senior trade official has said that a free-trade agreement between the US and European Union (EU) would boost its growth by as much as one per cent, leading to many more jobs. The EU and the US recently began formal talks on a trade deal. The deal would  be the biggest free-trade agreement in history. EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht said both were still "suffering the effects of the earthquake that hit our economies in 2008”. "This is the cheapest stimulus package you can imagine,” he told an audience at Harvard University on Saturday, saying that for the EU, "the income effects of the deal that we are now trying to achieve should be between 0.5 per cent and one per cent of GDP, meaning hundreds of thousands of jobs”.  EU-US trade is currently worth around $613b a year.