August 9, 2026

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The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • Strategic Insight

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New EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before AntalyaNew EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before Antalya
August 9, 2026

Newsletter

The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • Strategic Insight

LATEST
New EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before AntalyaNew EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before Antalya

Numbers Show Europe’s Competitiveness Reset Barely Off The Ground

Stefano Okaka
Policy Tracker, Economy and Competitiveness

The scoreboard tells a blunter story than the speeches. Nearly two years after Mario Draghi handed Brussels a 400-page blueprint for reviving European competitiveness, the data assembled in this year’s Single Market and Competitiveness report suggests the bloc is still closer to the starting line than the finish. Research and development spending sat at 2.24 percent of GDP in 2024, a fraction lower than the 2.26 percent of 2023 and a long way short of the 3 percent target the EU first set in the year 2000. A quarter of a century of ambition has moved the needle barely at all.

The international comparison is where it stings. South Korea now pours close to 5 percent of its economy into R&D, the United States 3.6 percent, Japan 3.4 percent and even China 2.6 percent, all comfortably ahead of a Europe that keeps promising to catch up. Patent intensity, another rough proxy for inventive muscle, slipped from 153 applications per million inhabitants to 152 over the same year. These are small movements, but in the wrong direction, and they accumulate into the productivity gap that worried Draghi in the first place.

Implementation has been the weak link. By the report’s own reckoning, only around a tenth of Draghi’s recommendations had been fully delivered a year after publication, with another fifth partially in place and the largest share still grinding through the machinery or untouched entirely. Draghi himself has described progress as more crawling than walking. The pattern is familiar: the recommendations that require no money and little coordination move fastest, while the structural ones, those touching capital markets, energy pricing or national vetoes, stall in the Council where unanimity quietly buries ambition.

The Commission’s answer is a single market roadmap stretched out to 2028, covering capital, services, energy, telecoms and two newer ideas with catchy names. The so-called 28th regime would let companies operate under one optional EU-wide legal framework instead of 27 national ones, while a proposed fifth freedom would add the free movement of knowledge and innovation to the original four. Both are sensible on paper and hostage to politics in practice, because every step toward a deeper single market asks at least one capital to surrender a protected niche.

That is the uncomfortable core of the competitiveness debate. The diagnosis is broadly agreed: Europe invests too little, fragments its markets and lets promising firms drift abroad for capital. The cure is also broadly agreed, at least in outline. What is missing is the willingness to absorb the short-term costs, the lost national champions and the redistributed spending, that any serious reset demands. Roughly half of the report’s key indicators were unchanged from 2023, with the rest split evenly between modest improvement and modest decline, a portrait of an economy treading water while its rivals swim.

None of this means the effort has failed. Roadmaps to 2028 are, by definition, unfinished, and the savings and investments union and capital markets work did edge forward over the winter. But the gap between the rhetoric of urgency and the arithmetic of delivery is now wide enough that observers can measure it precisely. The numbers do not care how many summits invoke Draghi’s name. Until R&D climbs, patents recover and the structural files unstick, the competitiveness reset will remain a plan admired more than enacted.

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