Charting a European Path to Competitiveness

Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness paints a dire picture of the bloc’s economic prospects. The report illustrates how the EU has lost business dynamism, the relative cost of doing business in the bloc has increased, and the global political environment has become more hostile to Europe’s trade-intensive business model. Yet progress in implementing the Draghi report’s recommendations remains slow – while the EU’s excessive technological reliance on the US has become less palatable.

Europe faces many dilemmas in trying to tackle its problems:

• How should it balance the need to boost growth, on the one hand, with protecting its economic security and digital sovereignty, on the other?
• Should the EU’s competitiveness strategy focus on protecting incumbent industries’ share of global exports – or embrace a more innovation-friendly, but potentially more disruptive, future?
• Should Europe simplify and better harmonise regulation to boost innovation, or is a more profound change to Europe’s precautionary regulatory approach necessary?
• Given Draghi’s diagnosis, and many of his recommendations, are not new, why has the EU been unable to deliver the necessary reforms? What institutional changes to the EU could help overcome this inertia?

CERRE’s team of leading academics have been addressing these questions in a series of papers over 2025.

Join us on 27 November 2025 in a discussion between CERRE’s academics, European policy makers, and industry leaders.