Competitiveness has returned to the fore of European economic policymaking with a vengeance. In this paper, we scrutinize the recent debate on the need for promoting European competitiveness, as prominently diagnosed by the Draghi Report. By disaggregating the overall academic and policy-oriented debate on competitiveness into three distinct conceptual strands – market share-focused competitiveness, productivity-focused competitiveness, and beyond-GDP competitiveness – we conduct a descriptive statistical analysis of competitiveness indicators for both the EU and the US. Based on a highly selective reading of the Draghi Report, the focus of current EU competitiveness policies on across-the-board deregulation will not only contribute little to address the identified problem areas, but risk to become self-defeating as they tend to exacerbate reliance upon an increasingly outdated export-oriented growth model of the EU, given pervasive protectionist tendencies in the global economy. We conclude that a more targeted approach to tackle both the innovation gap and energy dependencies is needed, which should be based on an expansionary public investment agenda and mission-oriented industrial polices.

DOI: doi.org/10.60637/2026-wp81