An agenda for a growing Europe: a comment

In this comment I will only tackle the growth problem - the big target that (up to now) the EU has missed - fully sharing the view of the Report that, without a more sustained growth, both cohesion and stability are at stake. In particular, I will concentrate on the US-EU comparison, which is the way in which the Report frames the problem, as most of the applied literature does. Such a comparison, in the last 10 years, and even more so since the beginning of this century, conveys a rather gloomy picture of European growth: is such a picture justified? Is the comparison well taken? On the whole I share the view that that Europe has a "growth problem", and particularly so the three big countries of the Eurozone: Germany, France, and Italy. And I basically share the analysis of such problem that the Report develops. In order to put the European growth problem in a wider and longer perspective, however, I argue that there are exceptional circumstances that contribute to explain the very strong growth that the US has enjoyed in the last few years and the disappointing one that has characterized Europe in the same period. Such circumstances are important per se and, above all, because they raise some radical queries on the whole institutional fabric of the European Union