EuropeChats - Can Europe confront its digital challenges? | Discussion with Seamus Allen

But can I just probe you a bit more on this? But in-- If I take competitiveness, for instance, I mean, why is it that Europe isn't competitive? What are-- I mean, how would you describe the situation on an issue like that, for instance?

Talking on competitiveness, now, I should say giving the right answer to that question is very hard, and I don't think I have the right answer.

Uh, what I think I do have are some ideas and questions, and sometimes asking the right questions is the best place to start.

Because in the debate about competitiveness, there's a couple of big prominent answers, uh, that are dominating the conversation, and where I differ perhaps from a lot of others is I'm very skeptical about some of those answers.

Some of those answers are very intuitive at first glance.

So, for example, one of the big themes in the conversation about competitiveness is completing Europe's single market.

Um, another one is tech uptake and adopting technology, and of course, that's very important.

Yeah.

But I'm worried about some of the metrics being used, and sometimes we need to measure how we're harnessing it more than just getting a certain percentage rate of adoption.

And in those debates, uh, so for example, on competitiveness and the single market, Europe seems to think if we complete the single market, we will suddenly be competitive.

Yes.

A couple of things that make me skeptical about this.

Uh, so you mentioned, for example, America and China earlier.

Yeah.

And a lot of the time in Europe when we talk about these things, we're looking at the US, we're looking at China.

Now, we absolutely need to look at them, uh, and that's good, uh, but sometimes we don't always draw the correct lessons.

Some of the American and Chinese economies, there is major internal economic fragmentation.

Now, we tend to forget about that.

Uh, but we also tend to spend too much time talking about America and China-

Yeah

...

when sometimes they're not the most relevant countries to be looking at.

So Europe has a big problem with competitiveness and with innovating in digital technology, uh, but we should also look at the likes of Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan.

Uh, they're all ahead of us in a variety of areas of digital technology, and I think there's a lot of lessons we can learn from them.

But, but what they're missing is a huge single market.