2023年度关于欧盟反倾销、反补贴和保障措施活动以及第三国在针对欧盟使用贸易保护工具的第四十二次年度报告

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 4The future of European competitivenessPart A | A competitiveness strategy for EuropeForewordEurope has been worrying about slowing growth since the start of this century. Various strategies to raise growth rates have come and gone, but the trend has remained unchanged.Across different metrics, a wide gap in GDP has opened up between the EU and the US, driven mainly by a more pronounced slowdown in productivity growth in Europe. Europe’s households have paid the price in foregone living standards. On a per capita basis, real disposable income has grown almost twice as much in the US as in the EU since 2000.For most of this period, slowing growth has been seen as an inconvenience but not a calamity. Europe’s exporters managed to capture market shares in faster growing parts of the world, especially Asia. Many more women entered the workforce, lifting the labour contribution to growth. And, after the crises of 2008 to 2012, unemployment steadily fell across Europe, helping to reduce inequality and maintain social welfare.The EU also benefitted from a favourable global environment. World trade burgeoned under multilateral rules. The safety of the US security umbrella freed up defence budgets to spend on other priorities. In a world of stable geopol-itics, we had no reason to be concerned about rising dependencies on countries we expected to remain our friends.But the foundations on which we built are now being shaken.The previous global paradigm is fading. The era of rapid world trade growth looks to have passed, with EU companies facing both greater competition from abroad and lower access to overseas markets. Europe has abruptly lost its most important supplier of energy, Russia. All the while, geopolitical stability is waning, and our dependencies have turned out to be vulnerabilities.Technological change is accelerating rapidly. Europe largely missed out on the digital revolution led by the internet and the productivity gains it brought: in fact, the productivity gap between the EU and the US is largely explained by the tech sector. The EU is weak in the emerging technologies that will drive future growth. Only four of the world’s top 50 tech companies are European.Yet, Europe’s need for growth is rising.The EU is entering the first period in its recent history in which growth will not be supported by rising populations. By 2040, the workforce is projected to shrink by close to 2 million workers each year. We will have to lean more on productivity to drive growth. If the EU were to maintain its average productivity growth rate since 2015, it would only be enough to keep GDP constant until 2050 – at a time when the EU is facing a series of new investment needs that will have to be financed through higher growth.To digitalise and decarbonise the economy and increase our defence capacity, the investment share in Europe will have to rise by around 5 percentage points of GDP to levels last seen in the 1960s and 70s. This is u