Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, I'm Zuzana Monsenk and Shaq and Shaq.

Our subject today is the Draghi report on competitiveness and Europe's loss of productivity and loss of innovation vis-à-vis the United States and China.

It was a dramatic report in terms of its conclusions. It was very detailed in terms

of its analysis and its policy recommendations and dramatic in its overall warning. Mario Draghi

warned that the EU's faces an existential risk. We don't often hear this expression being used

in the sacred halls of Brussels. But Draghi appears to think that

this is not only important, but this is absolutely vital for the EU, not to fall further behind

the US and China. And he called for a very significant investment program. Jack, what has Draghi

proposed and what do you think will happen? Yeah. So, I mean, in terms of

what he's proposed, I think the first thing to say is that a lot of these reports tend to follow

the pattern of kind of going at one particular area and then making a number of very grandly

recommendations. And while there is a lot of granularity in the report, well, obviously

there is because the report's about 400 pages long, the most important part I think are the kind

of headline things that Draghi has suggested that the EU try to focus on, which are kind of not

to say, okay, well, you need to do this and this very specific thing on this policy, but here are the

big picture issues that we need to address

in order to get the EU back on track. Broadly speaking, I would say they kind of fall into three

categories. One of them is that the EU basically just needs to invest more. It needs to invest a lot

more. Draghi's suggestion was that this should be the equivalent of about five percentage points

of EU GDP,

which would be about 800 billion euros a year.

So we are talking about a lot of money.

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