Research

In the wake of last August’s Paris summit the Centre for European Reform (CER) released a policy brief entitled: Can Europe Save Ukraine – and itself- from Putin and Trump?In the document Ian Bond, deputy director of the CER, said that Europeans need to face up to four key facts.The first is that Trump favours Putin over Zelenskyy and that the US is now doing relatively little to help Ukraine.The second is that the Russians will not agree to Ukraine having any effective protection against future attacks. The security guarantee for Ukraine allegedly accepted by Putin in his meeting with Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff says Bond is a mirage, and the US is reluctant to provide an insurance policy for European forces in Ukraine.Thirdly, Putin remains determined to win, not compromise and his peace terms would reduce Ukraine to vassal status.

In a report published ahead of the summit by various think-tanks, including the Centre for European Reform, Redeker and colleagues Sander Tordoir and Lucas Guttenberg point to a different set of problems EU leaders should be trying to solve."Chinese car exports are surging, European producers are being squeezed out of global markets, US tariffs are rising, and domestic demand remains 20 per cent below pre-pandemic levels," they write.

The European Commission shouldn’t give in to temptation and calls to loosen competition policy to boost competitiveness, Zach Meyers, associate fellow at the Centre for European Reform, told Aude. “Competition policy has generally been kind of a force for good and a force for innovation in Europe,” he said.Still, there are areas where improvements are needed, certainly when looking at it from a single market perspective, he said. Meyers co-authored a policy paper last week laying down a reform agenda for the internal market, which includes some ideas on the competition side. While Europe likes to boast that there are more competitors on the markets than in the US, these competitors operate in smaller national markets. The more concentrated US markets are more dynamic, with companies that are either growing or shrinking. Meanwhile, Europe lacks this dynamism with “kind of pretty stagnant [companies] in terms of size,” Meyers said.

John Springford, associate fellow at the Centre for European Reform (CER), said that countries that rely on gas to set the electricity price will tend to import more electricity. “Countries in which gas is more often the marginal producer will be bigger net importers. As the price of gas is higher, and they use gas more often, these countries will find that they import more from lower-priced plants abroad,” he said.

As Sander Tordoir, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform, notes, most of its participants — the EU, Japan, Canada — have positive trade balances. In other words, they need buyers, not sellers. And the US, which accounted for nearly half of the global trade deficit, is effectively leaving the market. “Europe will have to stimulate domestic demand, or it risks stagnation,” Tordoir warns.

Sander Tordoir, the chief economist at the Centre for European Reform, a think tank, says Europe and Britain must try to boost their own deployment of robotics if they want to keep up with the pace of innovation in China – while also keeping their manufacturing industries alive.“Robotics, if deployed well, can lift the productivity of your economy greatly. And if China is extremely good at it, then we should try to catch up because, like China, a lot of Europe is ageing,” he says.

Anton Spisak of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank, observes that, after Brexit took effect at the end of 2020, Britain’s goods exports have grown less than those of any other economy in the G7 club of rich countries.