BusinessEurope Reform Barometer 2019 – Building an EU for European businesses to succeed globally

BusinessEurope’s EU Reform Barometer 2019 “Building an EU for European Businesses to succeed globally”, published on 20 March 2019, shows that the EU needs to do more to improve its competitiveness as EU growth has now been lower than US growth for 7 of the last 10 years. In addition, the Reform Barometer contains our annual survey of our member federations regarding progress on structural reform.

This year’s Reform Barometer looks in particular at how Europe is falling behind in its ability to develop world-leading firms.

We arrive at this conclusion for 3 reasons:

• None of the top 10 global companies by market capitalisation are European.
• Western Europe’s share of the top 10% of global firms in terms of profitability has dropped from 36% in the late 1990s to 24% now.
• Finally, when considering large high-growth firms/’unicorns’ (start-ups that have reached 1 billion dollar market value within a short timeframe), the EU has not matched other regions when it comes to developing such firms, with the number and average value of unicorns in the EU significantly smaller than those in the USA and China.

Against this background it is concerning that, according to our survey of member federations, governments have failed to step up their reform efforts.  Our member federations consider that member states have satisfactorily implemented only 20% of the essential reforms agreed with the EU.

Detailed assessments by national member federations of progress on the country-specific recommendations (CSRs) issued by the European Commission for Greece can be downloaded below.