Electric vehicles (EVs) have grown from a niche technology to a mainstream industry in the space of a little over a decade. EV deployment is crucial to meet climate targets and is transforming the automotive industry – a cornerstone of manufacturing in both the United States and Europe. Unlike China, the EU and US are […]
Public debt-to-GDP ratios have climbed to historic highs in most advanced economies. This column studies the connection between productivity growth, fiscal policy, and public debt. Using a theoretical model, it argues that a feedback loop is possible between fiscal policy and growth. Large primary surpluses are associated with fiscal distortions which depress investment and productivity […]
Critical technologies including artificial intelligence, semiconductors and quantum computing are attracting attention because of their indispensable nature and their role in national security strategies. We compare China, the United States and the European Union in these technologies and their subfields. We use large language models (LLMs) to identify which patents in these technologies can be […]
The performance of stock markets often appears worse in the daily news than it actually is. This column argues that this negative news bias arises from two factors: (1) journalists tend to focus on major events, and (2) the daily performance of stock market indices is negatively skewed. It shows that about half of the […]
Faced with major security challenges, Europe is preparing to boost its defence capacity. To defend itself against Russia without the United States, Europe needs to rapidly increase spending from the current level of about 2 percent of GDP to an estimated 3.5 percent of GDP – an increase of about €250 billion annually (Burilkov and […]
Many European leaders express concern, or even dismay, that Europe is unable to launch and grow its own tech giants like those in the US . This reflects European insecurity about tech inferiority that goes back at least as far as France’s Plan Calcul in the 1960s. Europe wants the benefits that large, innovative firms create […]
