Our answers to your questions during the conference
Are the measures taken by the EU sufficient to strengthen its competitiveness and economic sovereignty?
The measures are certainly not sufficient at this stage, but 2025 has led to the emergence of a much more aggressive European position on these issues. The EU has begun to implement some of the recommendations in the Draghi report through its ‘competitiveness compass’ unveiled last February. This has led to the development of several plans aimed at both building new industries (AI Continent Action Plan) and better protecting the competitiveness of certain industrial sectors particularly affected by Chinese competition (support plans for steel/aluminium, chemicals, automotive), and to ease the regulatory burden on businesses (with the ‘Omnibus’ simplification packages). Implementing these plans may take time, but the momentum generated by the Draghi report is there.
How can Europe's necessary strategic sovereignty (food, health, armaments, energy) be reconciled with China's desire to maximise its penetration of the European market?
This is the balance that Europe is seeking. In contrast to the protectionist policies of the United States, Europe has chosen to pursue a policy of ‘derisking’ with regard to China: reducing critical dependencies while preserving the benefits of free trade in less strategic sectors. In early December, the European Commission presented new measures to strengthen the economic security of the 27 (tightening controls on foreign direct investment in Europe, strengthening technology transfer requirements for FDI and validating the RESourceEU plan to reduce Europe's dependence on critical materials and semiconductors). Thus, rather than excluding China, Europe is seeking to rebalance the power relationship with it, which is not inconsistent with strengthening Chinese investment in Europe.
How can we accelerate the financing of innovation in areas of strategic sovereignty at European level?
The difficulty in financing innovation, including in areas of strategic sovereignty, lies in the fact that research requires significant investment and does not provide an immediate return. Long-term savings and investment are therefore essential to support projects with deferred profitability, in particular to provide sufficient equity capital to innovative sectors and enable them to subsequently raise bank or market debt. The European Commission's initiatives (Savings and Investments Union) aimed at circulating and channelling savings within the European Union rather than outside it are a step in the right direction. The sooner the trial is transformed into concrete measures implemented in each Member State, the better.
It is also important to reduce – or at least not to increase – capital requirements that could penalise the financing of innovation by banks, to further encourage equity financing by insurers and households to complement bank financing, and to support securitisation beyond the European Commission's June 2025 proposal in order to free up more space in bank balance sheets for financing the economy, particularly innovative projects. Finally, public aid for innovation should also be coordinated more effectively between Member States and the European Union in order to avoid fragmentation and waste and to focus collective efforts on priority areas (somewhat along the lines of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the United States in the field of defence).
