A Compass to Guide EU Policy in Support of Business Competitiveness

The impression now is that Europe is on the retreat and the current European Commission is the first without a strategy to strengthen competitiveness at the EU level since the early 1990s. [...] While there has been shining examples in the past decades of rapid economic growth in the Eastern rim of the EU, the unfortunate fact is that the EU economy has been stagnating and that some parts of the EU have fallen behind. [...] With the establishment of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) in early 2021 – the programme to support economic recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic – the plan has been to increase the relevance of the reform-oriented country-specific recommendations in the European Semester and put new resources to support investments that help to reduce carbon emissions and improve the digital infrastruct. [...] This is because the enlargements of the EU in that period made Europe more dependent on trade with each other than on trade with the rest of the world since the new countries that joined the EU traded very little with the rest of the world compared to the size of their economies. [...] The establishment of the Common Commercial Policy and the European Community’s external trade policy after the Rome Treaty intended to boost productivity and economic activity, which it also did.18 In the 1970s, the Werner Plan for economic and monetary integration was born out of the same desire to lift Europe’s economic potential – at a time when the post-World War economic recovery had ebbed ou.