Just a week after Donald Trump assumed the presidency of the United States, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, presented in Brussels what has called ‘the compass for competitiveness’, an initiative that offers a strategic framework to the … Community Executive, based on the recommendations of the Draghi Report, to adopt the necessary measures that allow the EU to recover lost competitiveness against the United States and Asia and avoid becoming an irrelevant actor in the world economy.
«The business model that we have in Europe has basically based on China’s cheap labor, supposedly cheap energy from Russia and in the partial outsourcing of security. And that model has already expired, ”acknowledged von der Leyen. «We have a plan and also the political will. What matters is the speed, because the world is not waiting, ”said the community president in a successful diagnosis of the situation.
The problem is that precisely the lack of unity, and the slowness in decision making have been the main characteristics of the EU performance since its constitution. A tonic that has only broken on rare occasions and in very extraordinary situations, as happened with Covid, where there was unit in the purchase and manufacture of vaccines, or in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where it also acted together.
Will he be able to do it now also before the threat of protectionism that Donald Trump wants to implement in the United States and what damage can be done to Europe if it is not reacts? Will the EU be able to act together with this situation or each country will try to take a slice of its positions more or less close to the new US president?
I don’t have a clear answer to that question, but I know we play a lot. In recent years, while Chinese and Americans have dedicated themselves to developing artificial intelligence, means of payment, technological trade and a long etc. of activities, here we have dedicated ourselves to regulate, regulate and regulate and prohibit, prohibit and prohibit.
Europe “runs the risk of staying stagnant on a low growth path, with less income for employees, less well -being for disadvantaged and less opportunities for all,” said von der Leyen, and is not reason. It cannot be that companies need larger departments to adapt to regulatory, mainly European demands. But in the Spanish case, for example, apart from those European rules, we have to deal with state, autonomous and local, which makes everything even more complicated.
In that ‘Competitiveness Compass’, in which they set as objectives to reduce the innovation gap; achieve access to affordable energy and reduce excessive dependencies; Administrative simplification is proposed as one of the levers to achieve those objectives. And specifically, it plans to reduce administrative loads by companies by 25% and 35% for SMEs. It is also committed to reducing obstacles to the single market, eliminating barriers; Create new savings and investment products so that our startups do not have to go to fund to the US, promote quality employment and professional training and coordinate national and European policies. It seems that the European Commission has become aware of the problem facing Europe, and hopefully the arrival of Trump and its tariff threats serve so that we do not deviate from the direction that marks that compass.
#Yolanda #Gómez #Rojo #Europe #speed #unity #world #expect
