Hello everyone and welcome to ESAIP's Global Economy Podcast. My name is Frederick Erickson.

And today I am delighted to welcome my colleague, Oscar Ginnia, to this podcast and we're going to have a conversation about competitiveness.

Hello, Oscar.

Hi, hello.

Good morning, Frederick.

Hello.

And well, one starting point for the conversation we're going to have is, of course, that the European Commission published a couple of weeks ago, a competitiveness compass.

And we have both read that one carefully, and we've seen a lot of the discussions that have continued to unfold after the release of the compass.

And what I took away from it was basically in the first place that they do make lots of

references to the report on European competitiveness that Mario Draghi published in the beginning

of the autumn last year.

And when you look at the analysis that the commission makes, the contextual points that

they want to point to, that do rely heavily on the Draghi report.

The other observation I made is that they don't really come with any specific proposal yet. The compass itself

is a, it includes a long list of different initiatives that it says it wants to take, but it remains

to be seen what's going to come in these different initiatives that it takes. And that,

at least, led me to the conclusion that, well, let's wait

and see what they're going to do before we start to evaluate what they're doing. So I thought

this would be a better opportunity just to take sort of a deep dive into the competitiveness issues,

the substantive parts that Europe needs to deal with in order to improve itself.

So, Oscar, over to you.

How would you describe what are the competitiveness problems that Europe should address?

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