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EU competitiveness: Looking ahead [pdf]

commission.europa.eu

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Re: EU competitiveness: Looking ahead [pdf]

#21

Post by soco »

crop_rotation wrote: post #18
tossandthrow wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you mention airbus and Boeing. Anyhow, you are right, and that is the infamous downwards spiral and lack of sovereignty to the market. Either we see increased protectionism, increased inequality, or we pull our selves together and make a plain global playing field (eg. Through minimum taxation schemes).

Sadly Europe is not at a point where it can utilize increased protectionism to save itself. Europe has far too few natural resources and needs a far higher standard of living, necessitating importing a lot of stuff. Unless it can maintain technological edge in some products, Europe is doomed to lose it's current standard of living.

Maybe you know this already but I reckon rather not: Europe is not "one" state to apply all that things you mention. Europe is a loosely connected network of wildly diverging national and partisan interests, with resources very unevenly distributed, so I definitely cannot see an "European" solution - heck I cannot even expect one. So, nice chat, but not gonna happen - or at least not in this way.

Re: EU competitiveness: Looking ahead [pdf]

#23

Post by jandrewrogers »

blitzar wrote: post #5
crop_rotation wrote: post #2

One point that stands out > 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

Those poxy anti monopoly laws seem to be working.

You can reach a $100B market cap simply by creating an amazing product that people all over the world want to use, no monopoly required. A prerequisite for this, of course, is an ecosystem that encourages and efficiently enables the creation of amazing products.

Re: EU competitiveness: Looking ahead [pdf]

#24

Post by nickpp »

tossandthrow wrote: post #17
dachworker wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather we had the US situation where the market was dominated by new publicly traded companies, instead of companies, some of them not even publicly traded, all of which founded many decades, if not centuries ago. It is actually one of our biggest issues that not only is the population physically old, but everything we do is done in such an old fashioned way. As bad as Google and Facebook may be, they are pub…

That is an absurd dichotomy to setup and plain (bad) rhetorics. No, I would not want either. I want a market where participants are appraised based on the value they provide to the society.

> participants are appraised based on the value they provide to the society

How do you measure that? And who decides?

Re: EU competitiveness: Looking ahead [pdf]

#25

Post by nickff »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #20

If there was one group to look to for the future of human development, it would western Europe. These countries mostly have a terrific quality of life, the highest trust societies in the world, and, until recently, the moral high ground generally. It's a shame, then, that they are unable to make attractive economic rules, and organize in a way that can sustain them. Specifically as it pertains to EU economic planning…

> "What does work is making it easy to do business - cutting bureaucracy - and tax breaks. No one wants the headache of starting a business here. And the few that do, against all odds, get something off the ground, they quickly move their corporate headquarters to more tax friendly nations."

I am not an insider who has any special knowledge of the motivations of companies exiting Europe, but I suspect that those companies are at least as worried about regulatory uncertainty as they are about tax rates. The EU has a history of suddenly killing 'undesirable' business models and products through regulation. The EU also seems to make it generally difficult to scale up and scale down businesses, due to labor market regulations; if you're having a rough spell, you basically can't lay off your least productive workers and try to 'regroup', you might as well just sell off the productive business units, and shut down.

Re: EU competitiveness: Looking ahead [pdf]

#26

Post by tossandthrow »

nickpp wrote: post #24
tossandthrow wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an absurd dichotomy to setup and plain (bad) rhetorics. No, I would not want either. I want a market where participants are appraised based on the value they provide to the society.

> participants are appraised based on the value they provide to the society How do you measure that? And who decides?

That is up to a fair, well governed, market to decide that.

And before you say something along the lines of: "Well, the market want McDonalds food and snort themselves to death in cocaine" - let's just stop it there and think, in silence, about what a fair market is.

Re: EU competitiveness: Looking ahead [pdf]

#27

Post by agilob »

chewz wrote: post #10

800 billion euro per year and that on top of other needs like green initiatives. How are they going to finance such investments? EU banks don’t have capital and foreign borrowers will ask steep rates which will impact European borrowing costs and extinguish economic activity even more. The simple truth is Europe cannot afford such programs.

> How are they going to finance such investments?

Well, half joking here.. there probably will be a new green initiative to decarbonise IT. New tax money will pay for a new IT hub in Germany or France, where companies will stay for as long as EU pays their rent and gives tax incentives. After that, they will move out.

Re: EU competitiveness: Looking ahead [pdf]

#28

Post by throwaway13337 »

nickff wrote: post #25
throwaway13337 wrote: post #20

If there was one group to look to for the future of human development, it would western Europe. These countries mostly have a terrific quality of life, the highest trust societies in the world, and, until recently, the moral high ground generally. It's a shame, then, that they are unable to make attractive economic rules, and organize in a way that can sustain them. Specifically as it pertains to EU economic planning…

> "What does work is making it easy to do business - cutting bureaucracy - and tax breaks. No one wants the headache of starting a business here. And the few that do, against all odds, get something off the ground, they quickly move their corporate headquarters to more tax friendly nations." I am not an insider who has any special knowledge of the motivations of companies exiting Europe, but I suspect that those comp…

It's a mixed bag.

I think you're trying to refer to the Digital Markets Act indirectly at least with part of your comment.

Actually, I mostly believe in this regulation. Gatekeepers are a new kind of monopoly/government. This, too, discourages innovation. The US should have a spine against these companies. I'm glad the EU is, at least, trying to.

It also doesn't really affect small business. Or, indeed, helps them. I hope they can, in the end, force Apple to allow more than safari browser on iphones so PWAs can be a real thing.

GDPR, on the other hand, is hell for small businesses. It's complicated and scary. Understanding and implementing the rules is expensive. It's broader than you think - restaurants, for example, are often technically breaking the rules. Most businesses are breaking the rules somehow without knowing it. This is the sign of bad law.

From a consumer perspective, the cookie thing was just not thought out and extremely negative. Bad rules written by unthoughtful legislators. If they wanted to ban third party tracking, they should have just done that.

With respect to labor rules, I generally agree.

Re: EU competitiveness: Looking ahead [pdf]

#29

Post by maxwell »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #23
blitzar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those poxy anti monopoly laws seem to be working.

You can reach a $100B market cap simply by creating an amazing product that people all over the world want to use, no monopoly required. A prerequisite for this, of course, is an ecosystem that encourages and efficiently enables the creation of amazing products.

What's an example of one?

Re: EU competitiveness: Looking ahead [pdf]

#30

Post by niemandhier »

chewz wrote: post #10

800 billion euro per year and that on top of other needs like green initiatives. How are they going to finance such investments? EU banks don’t have capital and foreign borrowers will ask steep rates which will impact European borrowing costs and extinguish economic activity even more. The simple truth is Europe cannot afford such programs.

Numbers without scale are difficult to interpret: 800 billion are twice the German yearly budget or equal the American military budget.

So a lot, but far from insane.

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