Publications

When it comes to industrial policy, the EU remains big in ambition but meager in substance. This is not surprising. With its renewed strategy, the EU Commission aims to follow the international trend towards more active industrial policy. However, it has to do so within a...

In December 2020, the Council of the European Union adopted the EU’s long-term budget for the years 2021 to 2027. With a share of 31 percent of the total budget (around 330 billion Euro), cohesion policy remains an important priority area. Given the large amount of resources...

Our examination of 119,116 EU-funded projects in 6571 municipalities in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic shows that those receiving more EU funding grow more strongly and, ultimately, catch up economically. We break new methodological ground in the process by making...

Financial supervisory authorities in the EU are not sufficiently independent of political and economic influence. As the financial scandal surrounding Wirecard shows, this risks creating conflicts of interest that undermine the integrity of the European financial system and...

The financial sector must divest from unsustainable business. This is imperative to achieve a climate-neutral economy and to safeguard financial stability. The European sustainable finance regulatory agenda of 2018 launched important initiatives that increase transparency on...

With the global race for tech dominance and digital sovereignty set to intensify, we look at what the European Union is doing to strengthen its fledgling but ambitious startup sector. We find that despite bold and proactive new steps, the creation of European unicorns will...

Amid a severe health, social and economic crisis, banks again take centre stage on the political agenda. This policy paper explains why decisionmakers are worried about a looming banking crisis, sets out the existing European bank crisis management framework and makes...

When restarting work on reforming the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the Eurogroup should heed the lessons of the pandemic: The ESM has become politically unviable while there is apparently a lot more flexibility within the EU treaties than previously thought....

The European Commission’s AI strategy was released just a few short weeks before the global pandemic hit Europe. In her policy brief, Maarja Kask argues that AI can only be expected to help us through this pandemic and on a path of economic recovery if the upcoming...

The EU should seize the day: It should issue parts of the Recovery Instrument debt as green bonds and thereby boost that burgeoning market. But it is important to manage expectations: Issuing green bonds alone will not ‚green‘ recovery spending. This will depend on the...