GrUE - Groupe de recherche sur l'Union européenne reposted this
The freshly printed Draghi report is widely praised (or attacked) as a turning point in the EU industrial and investment policies. But are its content and proposals really new and cutting-edge ? That's when you need EU sociologists and political scientists ! In a piece published earlier this year in Competition and Change with Pierre Alayrac (as part of a special issue on the EU Investor State (👋 Ulrike Lepont & Matthias Thiemann), we show how the EU executive developed a series of repertoires (or "ages") of instruments and priorities for industrial policy and economic investments on the very long-term. From grants to "financial instruments" as promoted by an empowered European Investment Bank, from raw materials to high-tech and innovation, the EU investment policy grew patiently and steadily over time in the shade of competition or trade policies. Interestingly, the Draghi report tends to prove our point on the "concatenation" (or superposition) of these "ages of investments", combining both "old-school" budget-based grants and loans and "new-wave" venture capital to (co)finance the so-called "existential" projects. So, what's new in the "Draghi" report ? Maybe its recombining of "investment repertoires" that proposes to expand the perimeter of financial instruments such as venture capital to the old-school, extractive industries (such as mining, automotive), sectors that were usually helped with loans, grants or competition exemptions. It also means an extension of the "financialisation" of developmental policies at the EU scale, with promises of growth based on the supposed positive response of financial/capital markets incentivised with public money. Will that happen ? And is it reasonable to base our socio-economic transitions on the uncertain mobilisation of private markets ? I will leave you answer ! Ps : there are many other topics to discuss with this report, for instance the way it frames the environment (in a very, very, very narrow way). A lot of responses and insights were shared yesterday at a talk organised by GIS Euro-Lab and anne-laure Delatte with Clara Leonard, Eric Monnet and Pierre Alayrac (which recording will be available soon).