EU looks to sustain economic growth through Competitiveness Compass plan

By Mucahithan Avcioglu

ISTANBUL (AA) - The European Commission next week will present its Competitiveness Compass to sustain economic growth into the next quarter of the 21st century, said its President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday.

The focus will be “increased productivity by closing the innovation gap, a joint plan for decarbonization and competitiveness, (to) overcome skill and labor shortages and cut red tape," she said in her address at the annual Davos summit.

The plan will have three foundations: establishing a joint capital market, abolishing 27 national barriers of legislation for businesses and creating a single set of legislation for the European Union, and ending the continent’s energy dependence with clean, next-generation energy technologies.

The first foundation plans to unite European capital markets into a single European savings and investments union to prevent European citizens' money from flowing overseas for investments.

"€300 billion ($313.2 billion) of European family savings are invested abroad every year. That's a key issue holding back the growth of our tech start-ups and hindering our innovative clean tech sector," von der Leyen explained.

The second foundation focuses on facilitating business activities within Europe by creating a single set of legislation for businesses to deal with.

"Today, the European single market still has too many national barriers, so sometimes companies are dealing with 27 different national legislations,” she said, referring to the 27 EU member states.

"We will offer instead, to innovative companies to operate all across the EU under one single set of rules. We call it the '28th regime.' Continental scale is our greatest asset in the world of giants," she added.

The third foundation is about ending the continent’s energy dependence by investing more in next-generation clean energy technologies.

Von der Leyen said: "Already today Europe generates more electricity from wind and solar than from all fossil fuels combined. But we still have lots of work to do to feed through these benefits to companies and people.

"Not only we must continue to diversify our energy supplies and expand clean sources of generation from renewables and in some countries also from nuclear, we will have to invest next generation clean energy technologies like fusion, enhanced geothermal and solid state batteries," she said.