The European Union must “reinvent” its single market to extract its full potential, allow its economies to compete with the United States and China and thus scare away the “real threat of deindustrialization” that threatens the continent. These are the main conclusions of the report that the former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta will present tomorrow to the European Council, to which he will advise promoting an investment plan to deploy a true European industrial strategy and create an “investment market” that allows taking advantage of the enormous savings that Europeans accumulate in their accounts.
The European single market, which turned 31 on January 1, was designed in a very different context from the current one, for “a smaller world,” says Letta in the summary of the report, which La Vanguardia has accessed, for some time. in which the economies of Europe and the US were of similar size, China and India represented 5% of the world's wealth and a rules-based international order was put in place, while now force dynamics prevail.
Its potential is still there. But "it is time to develop a new single market", which will mean fully including in this framework finance, energy markets and electronic communications, which were once left out, defends the Italian academic. This will increase the size of large European companies, which today are much smaller than their North American and Chinese counterparts. The EU has always “aligned” its strategic priorities with the single market and this will now involve integrating the objectives of the double energy and digital transition, the expansion of the club and the increase in defense spending.
But if the EU wants to avoid the rejection of its plans by certain social sectors, it will have to clarify as soon as possible how it is going to finance it: "Today it is the farmers, tomorrow it could be the workers in the automobile industry," it warns. Letta is betting that the countries that inject the most state aid into their industries contribute to a newly created fund to finance pan-European investments, a formula that could help the EU compete with the US inflation reduction law.
To prepare his report, Letta visited 65 cities and held 400 meetings with political, business and social representatives throughout the continent, which allowed him to verify that although Europe led the deployment of high-speed trains, it is impossible to use them to move quickly between its regions. capitals. “In the coming years, the planning, financing and development of a great plan to connect European capitals by high-speed train must be prioritized,” Letta proposes.
