Hello and welcome to E-Sype Global Economy Podcast. I'm not Frederick Erickson, the usual host of the podcast. My name is Oscar Guinea. I'm a senior economist at ESAIP and today

I'm very pleased to welcome Peter Garikano to talk about EU competitiveness. Peter is the co-authored

of Silicon Continent, a weekly blog trying to understand why the EU economy is falling behind.

It is an excellent blog and I recommend everyone listening

to the podcast to sign up for Peter's blog in Substance. Peter, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me. Great. So on the 29th of January, the European Commission published

its competitiveness compass. Don't get too excited about traveling because

the competitiveness compass is a policy document where the European Commission presents a number of

strategies and regulations that aim to raise Europe's competitiveness. So, Peter, if you will have

to mark the competitiveness compass between zero being completely awful and 10 being the best policies that you can think of to boost the competitiveness of the European economy, which score will you give?

I think I'd probably assign it whatever the lowest possible passing grade is,

right, like a five and a half or a six out of ten. I think that the big strength of the

compass where you see is that they acknowledge that growth is a priority, that growth is a,

kind of a necessary condition to preserving the kind of European way of life, to preserving

our societies as they exist today. And they make a very strong case for growth and the

factors that underpin it, which is not the thing you should take for granted, given that this

is the same Commission President who no more than two years ago spoke at a degrowth conference

that they organised in the European Parliament.

And so that bit is very heartening and it's a good step.

Unfortunately, the actual substantive policies of the competitive compass don't necessarily indicate that they both have a lot of meat muscle behind them.

And they've understood what tactically are the right steps to take to increase growth.

And so, like, lowest passing

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