Macroeconomic policy / Economic Outlook

EU macroeconomic policy must focus on addressing the Union’s competitiveness challenges.

The EU economy has stagnated at 70% of U.S. GDP per capita for over 30 years. This underperformance is fundamentally due to lower long-term competitiveness gains, which feeds into persistent low growth and fragile public finances.

BusinessEurope has documented this trend in our bi-annual “Economic Outlook” publication.  But why does the EU have a competitiveness challenge? This is primarily due to the still fragmented state of EU real and financial markets, and high and growing regulatory burden. If those hindering factors are not addressed, a “slow death” of the European economy, in the words of Mario Draghi, is a real possibility.