Welcome to ESAB's Global Economy podcast.

My name is Frederick Erickson and today we're going to talk about relative economic decline

and more specifically the decline of the European economy in comparison

with the American economy. And with me to talk about this, I have my colleague, Oscar Gini,

who's a senior economist at E-Syp and who is also the lead economist behind a paper that we

published quite recently, which is specifically about

a topic. It's called If the EU was a state in the United States, comparing economic growth

between the EU and US states. And we make sure that we also put a link to that paper in the

show notes.

Oscar, I have seen your name being quoted and referenced in several newspaper articles

since we published this paper a few weeks ago.

Can you start by painting us a picture about EU economic growth

and perhaps how EU compare with the US in economic growth.

Thank you, Frederick, and thank you very much for having me on the podcast.

The EU and the US GDP per capita behave very similarly until 2000,

when the gap in GDP per capita between both started to widened.

This path of the burgeoned became particularly acute since the start of the global financial crisis in 2008.

Let me give you one example.

Between 2010 and 2021, US GDP per capita grew at an average of 3.4%,

while EU GDP per capita increased by 1.6% on average.

For some, the difference between 3.4 and 1.6 may not sound that alarming.

And that is true if we were to talk about one year.

...