An EU Compass to regain competitiveness

The European Commission presented the “Competitiveness Compass”, the first major initiative of this mandate providing a strategic and clear framework to steer the Commission's work. The Compass sets a path for Europe to become the place where future technologies, services, and clean products are invented, manufactured, and put on the market, while being the first continent to become climate neutral.

Over the last two decades, Europe has not kept pace with other major economies due to a persistent gap in productivity growth. The EU has what is needed to reverse this trend with its talented and educated workforce, capital, savings, single market, unique social infrastructure, provided it acts urgently to tackle longstanding barriers and structural weaknesses that hold it back.

The Draghi Report identified three transformational imperatives to boost competitiveness, and the Compass sets out an approach and a selection of flagship measures to translate each of these imperatives into reality: closing the innovation gap; a joint roadmap for decarbonisation and competitiveness; reducing excessive dependencies and increasing security.

The three pillars are complemented by five horizontal enablers, which are essential to underpin competitiveness across all sectors: simplification; lowering barriers to the single market; financing competitiveness; promoting skills and quality jobs; better coordination of policies at EU and national level.

“Europe has everything it needs to succeed in the race to the top. But, at the same time, we must fix our weaknesses to regain competitiveness. The Competitiveness Compass transforms the excellent recommendations of the Draghi report into a roadmap. So now we have a plan. We have the political will. What matters is speed and unity. The world is not waiting for us. All Member States agree on this. So, let's turn this consensus into action”, President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said.