Diego Begnozzi / Oct 2026
Image: Shutterstock
Walk into any Brussels policy debate this autumn and you will hear the same refrain: Europe is losing the investment race. Mario Draghi said as much two years ago, and the message has only sharpened since. Capital is flowing to the United States, to the Gulf, to Southeast Asia. The instinctive response is to ask what those places are doing that Europe is not.
At TEHA, we set out to answer a different question. Rather than looking outward, we looked inward, across the EU, to understand what is actually holding European investment back. The answer is not a shortage of good ideas. It is that Europe keeps failing to connect the good ideas it already has.
Our new study, ‘Investing in the EU,’ puts a number on the problem: fragmentation across infrastructure, energy, digital governance, skills, regulation and the rule of law is costing Europe an estimated €120 billion in missed investment every year, against a backdrop of roughly €600 billion in annual investment needs between now and 2030.
What struck us most in the research was not the scale of the problem but the evidence that Europe already knows how to solve it. Italy opened its high-speed rail network to competition and prices fell by 15 percent. Spain built a regulatory and industrial ecosystem around energy and content production, and now shares with the UK 58 percent of all global streaming investment in European content. France and Germany between them attracted over €110 billion in AI venture capital since 2020, proof that the continent can lead in the technologies that matter most, when energy, skills and regulatory clarity are right. Germany's dual apprenticeship system gets 84 percent of graduates into work within three years. The Netherlands built a commercial court operating entirely in English and now holds inward investment exceeding its own GDP. Poland turned Gdańsk into one of the world's most improved container ports, and Belgium, closer to home for many reading this, has turned a strong skills base into one of the highest rates of enterprise AI adoption on the continent.
None of these are theoretical models imported from elsewhere. They are European solutions, delivering European results. The problem is that they stop at the border. A Spanish energy reform does not automatically benefit Poland. A Dutch judicial innovation does not travel to Italy. Cross-border trains still run 23 percent slower than domestic ones, nearly forty years after rail liberalisation began. Only 3.8 percent of working-age EU citizens live in another Member State, even as three-quarters of employers say they cannot find the workers they need.
This is why our study sets out six concrete priorities. First, treat investment attractiveness as one joined-up framework, not a patchwork of isolated interventions. Second, treat diversity between Member States as a source of specialisation, not a problem to engineer away. Third, make coordination, not harmonisation for its own sake, the organising principle for cross-border rail, integrated grids and shared digital infrastructure. Fourth, place regulatory harmonisation at the centre of the agenda, closing the gap between common EU rules on paper and 27 operating regimes in practice. Fifth, build systematic mechanisms, not one-off pilots, for scaling Member State best practice. And sixth, remember that European integration turns each location into a gateway to a market of 450 million people.
The answer to Europe's competitiveness question is not another external benchmark exercise. It is a deliberate, structured effort to scale what is already working. Europe does not need to reinvent itself. It needs to trust its own evidence, and act on it.
