AGI – “Our organization, our decision-making process and financing are designed for yesterday’s world, pre-Covid, pre-Ukraine, pre-conflagration in the Middle East, pre-return of great power rivalry. We need a European Union that is worthy of the world of today and tomorrow. So what I propose in the report that the President of the Commission asked me to prepare is a radical change. This was stated by the former president of the ECB, Mario Draghi, speaking at an event on the European social pillar in La Hulpe, Belgium. “We must achieve a transformation of the European economy, we must be able to rely on a reliable decarbonised energy system, a European integrated defence, domestic production in the most innovative sectors and a leading position in manufacturing technology,” he added.
The former Prime Minister noted that “we rightly have an ambitious climate agenda in Europe and strict targets for electric vehicles, but in a world where our rivals control many of the resources we need, this agenda must be combined with a plan to secure our supply chain, from critical minerals, to batteries, to charging infrastructure.”
And again: “We have not had an industrial deal at European level, despite the Commission making every effort to fill this gap. Despite the positive initiatives underway, we still lack an overall strategy to respond to these strategies. We invest less than States The United States and China in digital and advanced technologies, including defense, are only four top European players among the top 50 global companies.”
“We lack a strategy on how to protect our traditional industries from unfair competitiveness caused by asymmetries in rules, subsidies and trade policies,” Draghi continued. “Energy-intensive industries are a case study: in other regions these industries not only face lower energy prices but also less regulatory burden and in some cases receive massive subsidies that directly threaten the ability of European companies to compete. Without action studied and coordinated policies, it is logical that some of our industries will shut down their capacities and relocate outside the EU”.
In the opinion of the former Italian prime minister “Once public goods have been identified, we must also give ourselves the tools to finance them. The public sector has an important role and in the past I spoke about how we can better use the common debt capacity of the European Union, especially for defense where the fragmentation of spending reduces our total effectiveness. But a large part of the investment gap must be covered by private investments. In the EU, a very high rate of private savings is mostly channeled into bank and non-bank deposits they finance growth as they should in a larger capital market – concluded Draghi – why advancing the Capital Markets Union is an essential part of the overall competitiveness strategy.”
