EconPol Forum 03/2024: EU Policy Priorities: How to Ensure Europe’s Competitiveness and Future Prosperity?

Europe ‒ once a leader in industrial development and innovation ‒ has lost its competitiveness. Which place will it take in a new world order? Climate protection and the digital transformation will also influence the next era of prosperity. The EU and its member states now want to build a robust, secure, resilient, and sustainable economy. Meanwhile, the US, China, and some emerging economies have overtaken the EU in many international rankings. In this issue of EconPol Forum, our authors take a critical look at the main economic and political causes of the EU’s declining competitiveness and its consequences for prosperity. And they also shed light on the bigger challenges that lie ahead. Our authors explore how future economic policy at the level of the EU and its member states should respond to increasing global competition. In “Economic Policy and Its Impact,” the authors systematically compare how selected countries and the EU promote technological sovereignty. In “Institutions Around the World,” they examine how different cultural values and attitudes in the population affect the most important dimensions of economic performance. In “Big-Data-Based Economic Insights,” the authors show that differences in people’s patience (“the relative valuation of present versus future payoffs”) could be responsible for the large and long-standing sub-national differences in student achievement.