A new implementation tracker suggests Brussels has moved fastest where security pressure is high, while deeper market and investment reforms remain delayed.
The European Union has fully delivered only 15.7 per cent of the reforms proposed by Mario Draghi to restore European competitiveness, according to a new implementation assessment that turns the EU’s flagship economic agenda into a measurable accountability test.
The assessment, reported on 15 July, was prepared by the European Policy Innovation Council and tracks progress against the wide-ranging reform programme Draghi set out in his competitiveness report. The tracker says another 41.3 per cent of measures have been partially implemented, leaving a large share still delayed, incomplete or dependent on national political choices.
The number matters because the Draghi report was not a routine policy paper. It framed Europe’s economic position as a strategic challenge: low productivity, fragmented capital markets, expensive energy, slow innovation, defence underinvestment and a widening gap with the United States and China. Nearly two years later, the tracker suggests the EU has been better at endorsing the diagnosis than delivering the structural cure.
Draghi’s central argument was that incremental adjustment would not be enough. Europe needed to mobilise investment at scale, remove barriers inside the Single Market and treat competitiveness as a security issue. The tracker is therefore not only a bureaucratic scorecard. It is a measure of whether the EU has acted on its own strategic warning.
The pattern of implementation is politically revealing. Measures connected to security, defence and supply-chain resilience have advanced more quickly because the war in Ukraine, energy shocks and geopolitical pressure have made delay harder to justify. Reforms that require deeper integration, shared financing or national governments to surrender control have moved more slowly.
That split explains why Europe can approve national semiconductor subsidies while still struggling to build a fully integrated investment environment. EU Today has recently examined how German chip subsidies revive questions over who can afford industrial sovereignty. The Draghi tracker widens that question: Europe may be acting on industrial policy, but not always through the common reforms needed to avoid subsidy competition between member states.
Capital markets are one of the clearest examples. Draghi argued that Europe needs deeper, more integrated financing channels to support innovation and scale-up companies. Yet capital-markets union has repeatedly stalled because taxation, insolvency law, pensions, supervision and national financial interests remain politically sensitive. Without deeper capital pools, European companies often struggle to grow at the same pace as US rivals.
Energy is another slow area. High energy costs remain a structural disadvantage for European industry. Some emergency measures have passed since the 2022-2023 energy crisis, but the deeper challenge is building a system that combines clean power, grids, storage, industrial supply and predictable prices. That requires national infrastructure choices as much as Brussels legislation.
The implementation gap also affects defence. Europe has increased spending and launched more joint initiatives, but fragmented procurement remains a long-standing weakness. If member states buy separately, European industry receives weaker demand signals and production lines scale more slowly. Draghi’s competitiveness logic therefore overlaps with the security debate: Europe cannot be strategically autonomous if it cannot finance and produce at scale.
The tracker should be read with methodological caution. Any reform index depends on how recommendations are counted and how partial delivery is defined. But its value is that it forces policymakers to compare promises with implementation. It turns “competitiveness” from a slogan into a scoreboard.
It also changes the politics of delay. Governments can no longer say only that work is continuing; they can be asked which recommendations are complete, which are stalled and which require national decisions. That makes the index potentially uncomfortable for capitals as well as for Brussels.
The political risk for Brussels is that slow delivery becomes self-reinforcing. If companies and investors conclude that structural reforms will remain blocked, they may plan around national subsidies, US incentives or Asian supply chains instead of betting on a European market transformation. That would leave the EU with more policy language than investment leverage.
The Draghi agenda was designed to answer a strategic question: whether Europe can remain wealthy, secure and technologically relevant without deeper integration. The tracker suggests the answer is still undecided. Brussels has moved where crisis pressure is immediate. It has moved less where reform requires member states to accept that competitiveness is no longer a national project alone.
