Simone Bertaiola @simonebert

Mario Draghi's new report on EU competitiveness doesn't mince words. "Across different metrics, a wide gap in GDP has opened up between the EU and the US, driven mainly by a more pronounced slowdown in productivity growth in Europe. Europe’s households have paid the price in foregone living standards. On a per capita basis, real disposable income has grown almost twice as much in the US as in the EU since 2000." "First – and most importantly – Europe must profoundly refocus its collective efforts on closing the innovation gap with the US and China, especially in advanced technologies. Europe is stuck in a static industrial structure with few new companies rising up to disrupt existing industries or develop new growth engines. In fact, there is no EU company with a market capitalisation over EUR 100 billion that has been set up from scratch in the last fifty years, while all six US companies with a valuation above EUR 1 trillion have been created in this period. This lack of dynamism is self-fulfilling." "There are not enough academic institutions achieving top levels of excellence and the pipeline from innovation into commercialisation is weak. [...] However, while the EU boasts a strong university system on average, not enough universities and research institutions are at the top. Using volume of publications in top academic science journals as an indicative metric, the EU has only three research institutions ranked among the top 50 globally, whereas the US has 21 and China 15." "Regulatory barriers to scaling up are particularly onerous in the tech sector, especially for young companies. Regulatory barriers constrain growth in several ways. First, complex and costly procedures across fragmented national systems discourage inventors from filing Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), hindering young companies from leveraging the Single Market. Second, the EU’s regulatory stance towards tech companies hampers innovation: the EU now has around 100 tech-focused laws and over 270 regulators active in digital networks across all Member States. Many EU laws take a precautionary approach, dictating specific business practices ex ante to avert potential risks ex post. For example, the AI Act imposes additional regulatory requirements on general purpose AI models that exceed a pre-defined threshold of computational power – a threshold which some state-of-the-art models already exceed. Third, digital companies are deterred from doing business across the EU via subsidiaries, as they face heterogeneous requirements, a proliferation of regulatory agencies and “gold plating” of EU legislation by national authorities. Fourth, limitations on data storing and processing create high compliance costs and hinder the creation of large, integrated data sets for training AI models. This fragmentation puts EU companies at a disadvantage relative to the US, which relies on the private sector to build vast data sets, and China, which can leverage its central institutions for data aggregation. This problem is compounded by EU competition enforcement possibly inhibiting intra-industry cooperation. Finally, multiple different national rules in public procurement generate high ongoing costs for cloud providers. The net effect of this burden of regulation is that only larger companies – which are often non-EU based – have the financial capacity and incentive to bear the costs of complying. Young innovative tech companies may choose not to operate in the EU at all." More: commission.europa.eu/document/downl….

Ursula von der Leyen @vonderleyen

2 years ago

Dear Mario Draghi, a year ago, I asked you to prepare a report on the future of Europe’s competitiveness. No one was better placed than you to take up this challenge. Now, we are eager to listen to your views ↓

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The Draghi report contains one of the most spot-on critiques for the current state of EU industrial policy I have read so far. And it comes with some solid ideas on how to move forward. Here are the three main takeaways.

Everyone who thinks the world could just stop using fossil fuels on the snap of a finger should have a look at this chart. More than 80% of the world's energy supply presently comes from oil, gas, and coal, and that number has barely changed in the past decade. Of course we will eventually phase out fossil fuels, simply because the supply is finite. No matter how hard you dig, there's only so much of the stuff. But at present, the life of pretty much everyone on this planet depends in one way or another on fossil fuels. In case you live in a fancy new "zero emissions" house, well, first of all congrats on being in the 0.001% of the world population who can afford that, and second, try to figure out how many of the supply chains for building that house would break down without fossil fuels. If we were to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions tomorrow without also subsidizing fossil fuels, much of the world economy would collapse because most of the key industries would go bankrupt basically overnight. (I think we should still put a price on carbon because it's the right default, but then we'll need to find a way to ease the transition.) This is why it's become so hard to solve this problem. It would have been easy enough 50 years ago to put a price on carbon dioxide, switch to nuclear, and with further improvements in solar to more of that. But we've missed that bus. I want to emphasize again because people keep misunderstanding this, I am not a fan of fossil fuels. If it were up to me, I'd plaster the world with nuclear power plants tomorrow and would take great pleasure in seeing oil companies falter and die. I am merely saying this is a difficult problem to solve, and the reason it's difficult is not technological, it's mostly economical. That said, let me stress again that I think the extensions of the electric grid necessary to support the transition to renewables are an underappreciated problem. Without the grid, nothing else is going to work.

@levelsio @skender @petrroyce He is a EU citizen, he’s asking a different question - he only has a EU ID card to show as document because he never had a passport done (still a EU citizen though 😊)

Is Britain getting a bad deal? @Ben_A_Hopkinson and I looked at 242 infrastructure projects across 14 different countries. Our conclusion? It costs more to build new tram systems, railways, and roads in Britain than almost anywhere else in the world. 🧵 samdumitriu.com/p/britains-inf…

So, here is the story of @POTUS's visit to #Kyiv and how #RailForceOne was born. Grab some 🍿, @Amtrak. Danger: long 🧵 ahead.

.@ItalyinLDN com’è possibile mettersi in contatto con i vostri uffici? Accettate telefonate solo 3 ore a settimana (2 ore per Stato Civile), e quando si cerca di chiamare è un continuo “tutte le linee sono occupate”, staccando la chiamata in automatico invece di usare una coda…

@krishnanrohit Tax evasion, mostly - it’d give states full access to every citizen’s transactions forever and ever, which would help with tax evasion but is also scary

Did you know about Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund? sovereigntechfund.de/en.html It's finally doing something about the problem illustrated in this xkcd: so much of our digital infrastructure is reliant on open source tools that are only kept going through good will.

@lorepregliasco

@lorepregliasco

This seems like a really cool project

Prashant Rao @prashantrao

4 years ago

Today's rundown of the world's news, courtesy of @semafor's daily global newsletter, Flagship. Sign up here: semafor.com/newsletters

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Liz Truss resigns on.ft.com/3F5plUe

@ferdinandodanzi @SimGui @automatikos @lorepregliasco Carissimi, il tweet era una battuta sul fatto che, a Torino, solo la zona “ZTL” (simpaticamente detta Torino Bene) ha votato così tanto Calenda. Basta guardare dati e mappe. Nessun giudizio di merito - quelli li lascio a voi. Cordialmente

@paolo71_22299 @lorepregliasco Egregio, ha ragione, risiedo a Londra. Il tweet era una battuta sul fatto che, a Torino, solo la zona “ZTL” ha votato così tanto Calenda. Se guarda i dati se ne accorgerà. Se vuole spiegarmi cosa ho detto di stupido la ascolto. Cari saluti

@crispiandjb Who would have thought :-)

@Psythor I’ve just realised I’m an O’Malleyist too! Your paragraph “A short guide to James O’Malley Thought” basically summarises my rebuttals to wishy-washy Fridays for Future sustainability activists types. Thanks for writing it out so perfectly

@__nero @pap1pap @Matador1337 @Cadelux Chi è braccetto?

@Matador1337 @pap1pap @Cadelux @la_stordita Sapevo mi avresti incastrato così 🤣 Dima fa un sacco di svarioni in difesa, però se ieri era quello più in forma una chance dall’inizio gliel’avrei data