A year since Mario Draghi, a former Italian prime minister and European Central Bank governor, presented his report on European competitiveness, \u201cthe sense of urgency has only deepened,\u201d says Greek Finance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis in an opinion piece published in \u03a4he Economist on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe push to complete the single market must, however, go hand in hand with reigniting competitiveness. The European Commission is right to target persistent barriers that fragment the continent\u2019s economies. But although regulatory convergence is necessary, it is far from sufficient,\u201d he says, adding that \u201cthe importance of completing the single market is underlined by stark statistics: intra-EU barriers act as a de facto tariff of 44% on average in goods\u2014three times higher than trade barriers between American states\u2014and an even steeper 110% in services, according to the IMF.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLowering these barriers should be a priority. Nevertheless, a new burst of European growth will require pursuing two additional, critical shifts.\u201d<\/p>\n
The minister says EU needs to be more strategic about where it pools its resources\u2014sector by sector.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTake telecommunications. It is a capital-intensive industry with declining margins, yet essential for digital competitiveness. In Europe today, telecoms operators face 27 different regulatory regimes and have had to navigate 27 separate 5G-spectrum auctions. This patchwork drives up cost, slows deployment and makes it harder to achieve scale,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Contrast that to the United States which has a single regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, and a single spectrum-allocation process, he continued. Meanwhile, China has gone even further, allocating the spectrum administratively to operators, rather than auctioning it, in recognition that 5G\u2019s value lies not in auction revenues but in the applications and services it enables.<\/p>\n
\u201cEurope\u2019s position in this broader geopolitical context has been paradoxical. In recent years, global competition over digital infrastructure has evolved into full-fledged strategic rivalry. Whereas the European Union has lacked a cohesive response, European companies have often been at the centre of the most important developments\u2014as leading providers of 5G infrastructure, standards and innovation. In other words, Europe held many of the tools but lacked the common policy to turn them into long-term industrial strength,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
In Greece, the government tried to respond to this challenge at the national level. \u201cWe retained 25% of our 5G-auction proceeds to establish a special fund to invest in companies building 5G-enabled applications. This reflects a recognition that in the digital era infrastructure alone is not enough. Innovation on top of that infrastructure is what drives growth,\u201d he writes. \u201cHad Europe instead adopted a co-ordinated or even singular regulatory approach, a unified auction framework and a common funding mechanism for strategic tech investment in 5G applications, it might have positioned itself more convincingly as a global leader in 5G-enabled innovation. The opportunity cost of fragmentation is measured not only in missed efficiency, but also in lost competitiveness.\u201d<\/p>\n
The second required change, the minister argued, is to align regulation with the growth priorities of the future, like in the case of procurement. \u201cHere traditional construction projects tend to move forward much more swiftly than digital or innovation-driven projects. That discrepancy is not merely procedural\u2014it reflects the growth priorities of an era in which physical infrastructure dominated strategic thinking,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday the shelf-lives of digital projects are often measured in months. In Europe, however, the timelines to commission and deliver them are measured in years, the minister says. If it takes longer to procure a digital-identity system or a public e-health platform than it does to resurface a motorway, the institutional framework is clearly exerting a drag on ambition.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe question we should be asking is not \u2018How do we make procurement easier?\u2019 but \u2018What do we want procurement to achieve?\u2019 The answer must be growth and innovation. That means rewriting rules to be fit for agile development, public-private technology partnerships and rapid deployment in areas like AI, cyber-security, energy transition and advanced manufacturing,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A year since Mario Draghi, a former Italian prime minister and European Central Bank governor, presented his report…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135917,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[45,49,48,46,17203,100,1215],"class_list":{"0":"post-135916","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-markets","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-economy","12":"tag-euro","13":"tag-markets","14":"tag-trade"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}