Mario Draghi delivers a wake-up call on the EU economy. Can it be revived?

Former ECB chief Draghi has delivered his long-awaited report into the sluggish EU economy and what can be done to revive it.

Mario Draghi Unveils Plan Aimed at Curing EU's Single Market Malaise
(Image credit: Bloomberg / Contributor)

Europe’s super-technocrat Mario Draghi – the former chief of the European Central Bank (ECB) and Italy’s emergency prime minister in 2021-2022 – delivered a long-awaited report into Europe’s stagnant economy on 9 September, and what can be done to revive it. During the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis, the erstwhile World Bank and Goldman Sachs economist was famed for vowing to do “whatever it takes” to protect the euro from collapse. 

His mammoth and rather chilling 400-page report, delivered last week to the European Commission in Brussels, is “a great deal more wordy” but delivers essentially the same message, says the Financial Times. Draghi wants a far more integrated, bloc-wide industrial policy focused on digital and clean technology and defence, plus more rapid decision-making if it wants to keep pace economically with the US and China. In addition, it will need a gigantic level of public and private capital to raise the proportion of GDP spent on investment by 4.7 percentage points (about 27%). This time, “whatever it takes” works out at roughly €800 billion a year.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.