Judging by its strong, dramatic language, Mario Draghi’s big report on European competitiveness was clearly intended to get EU decision-makers’ attention. Rather than trying to sugarcoat the pill, he warns that Europe is falling ever further behind the United States. Not only has it largely missed the digital revolution, but it is about to miss the AI revolution, too.
Not one European technology firm can rival the likes of Apple or Microsoft. Moreover, Draghi notes that productivity growth across the continent is lagging behind that of the US, confronting the European Union with an “existential challenge.” If it does not “radically change” its ways, it “will have lost its reason for being.
” Even as wake-up calls go, this was a loud one -- the kind that some alarm clocks make if you ignore their first polite nudges. Draghi’s conclusions will be music to the ears of the dwindling band of Brexiteers in the United Kingdom, because they have always peddled European sclerosis. In making the case for “Leave,” they argued that the UK was bound to a dead donkey and needed to break free.
But Draghi is no Euroskeptic or enthusiast for subsidiarity, and most of his recommendations would require “more Europe” in the form of coordinated policies and a huge boost to publicly funded investment at the EU level. He argues that an additional 800 billion euros ($892 billion) of investment is urgently needed to address the productivity problem and turbocharge the transit.
