


The report on The Future of European Competitiveness presented by Mario Draghi provides a clarion call for economic reforms to stop Europe’s relative decline. This short comment cannot do justice to the report with over 300 pages of supporting material. We will concentrate just on two key messages regarding innovation and investment.

ASML has a global monopoly on EUV, the most advanced lithography technology that is on the Wassenaar Arrangement list of dual-use technologies and requires an export license. The Dutch government approved the export license of EUV-technology to China in 2018. The US government was not pleased and tried to press its ally to consider the security issues.

Elisabeth Braw, a widely respected expert in international relations and security, is currently a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. Before transitioning to research, she was a journalist, a background that informed her recent book published by Yale University Press, titled Goodbye Globalization: The Return of a Divided World.

With many new restrictive measures in place one would have expected trade to fall. However, the most one can say is that globalisation has turned into slowbalisation.