Summary of the day
Eva Maria Poptcheva, a Spanish member of the European parliament, said she believes “the top challenge right now is really competitiveness of the European economy” and called for more investment in productivity and strategic sectors.
Maria Demertzis, a senior fellow at the Bruegel thinktank in Brussels, and a professor of economic policy at the European University Institute, told us today that in Europe “the risk of recessions are very, very real, given the uncertainties”.
Philipp Lausberg, a policy analyst in the European political economy programme at the European Policy Centre, said today that “the main challenge to the EU economy is the bloc’s diminishing competitiveness”.
Guntram Wolff, CEO and director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, told us today that “higher energy costs combined with geopolitical uncertainty represent a major headwind to the EU and the German economy in particular”.
Germany’s federal agency for energy and communications told consumers they can rest assured that Europe’s biggest economy has stored enough gas to see it through the winter, with storage units across the country reported to be 100% full, but urged consumers to continue to use gas sparingly.
The European Central Bank released results from a new survey showing that “large firms expect to become more active in (re)locating operations over the next five years to make their businesses more resilient”.
An opinion poll carried out for El País newspaper and SER radio network found that almost 23% of Spaniards have experienced “anxiety or depression” due to the rise in the cost of living.
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Europe should invest in productivity and strategic sectors, parliamentarian says
Eva Maria Poptcheva, a Spanish member of the European parliament from the Ciudadanos party, told us today that she believes “the top challenge right now is really competitiveness of the European economy”.
So how do we get there, to be competitive again? We need a lot of investments, but we need investments in two things. The first is productivity. And the second is to invest in strategic sectors. And we are not good in doing neither one nor the other.
Because in Europe, we are really good in investing in infrastructure, in buildings, this kind of things, but we don’t really have a culture of investing into productive goods, like reskilling.
Poptcheva, who serves as vice-chair of the EU parliament’s committee on economic and monetary affairs, stressed that “our jobs are going to go somewhere else if we’re not productive enough”.
Speaking of strategic sectors, Poptcheva added:
We have digital hubs here and there, in Dublin and in Portugal, etc, but we don’t have a Silicon Valley. So we have a big fragmentation in terms of strategic sectors.
And why is that like this? Because we have investment at national level. And this is something that makes me very worried actually, because if we are looking now at the revision of the fiscal rules, one of the problems there again, is that in the new European fiscal rules … everything is designed at national level, so national investments. But actually the big strategic projects, these are cross-border projects.
Poptcheva said the EU needs “common fiscal capacity” and “implementation at EU level directly” to address this issue.
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