Why is Europe losing the productivity race?
https://www.diplomaticourier.com/posts/why-is-europe-losing-the-productivity-race
by Cool_Distribution860
Why is Europe losing the productivity race?
https://www.diplomaticourier.com/posts/why-is-europe-losing-the-productivity-race
by Cool_Distribution860
27 comments
Two reasons:
– people work less hours
– too much regulation
There is more in life than just being the leader in productivity
I need someone smarter than me to answer this. Will the life of EU citizens be better if productivity goes up or will they sacrifice free time and work safety for the line to go up?
europe’s productivity levels have been comparatively stagnant over the past 15 years because the eu has largely regulated itself out of the ability to compete in the main drivers of productivity in that time-frame – it and tech.
it’s doing the same thing now with ai so i don’t see it getting any better, especially with china slowly but surely creeping into the sectors where the eu remained ahead until now – high value added manufacturing and industry
add onto that the energy crisis and you’ve got the perfect storm that i expect the eu to be unable to effectively manage just like all the others that came before
oh well
By telling efficiënt workers they don’t matter anymore safety is the only thing that matters. Giving credits to workers who find safety issues and stopping the process. Don’t get me wrong safety matters but overcompensating is a thing. Oh e learnings are made way to important too. And useless toolbox meetings please dont get me started on waiting for spare parts because its more cost effective to get them from a third party. Stop managing and start working we have way to much stupid efficiency staff walking around, let them work if they know how.
Europe have only regulations for the lower financial countries. What I mean with this? Yes, there are regulations for e.g. greece. But if Germany export 1000 VW to France, this means 1000 Citroens less. In sum the productivity for Germany and France is zero, for this 1000 cars. And that VW can export this 1000 cars means too, that VW can’t sell the cars in Germany.
“digital technologies” For the mass market? Facebook, youtube, Bing/MS, X/Twitter, Amazon Cloud, Netflix? Maybe Deezer, but what else? Can someone tell me e.g. a search engine from a European country?
Because existential quality of life isn’t not about servicing the predilections of pyramid schemers?
Because we are winning the ‘who has a life’ race.
God, those comments are just amazing. Europeans seem to be more Americanized day-after-day.
1. Europe is not over-regulated. Product market and FDI regulation indexes largely show Europe is as good of place to do business as the US.
2. Everyone is following behind the US. UK, Canada, Australia. Canada specifically has falling from being 4th most productive economy in the 1980s to something like 15th now.
3. Europe does have a shortage of capital lacking a pan-European banking system or a pan-European capital market. Despite the continent sitting on fairly massive surpluses of household savings those aren’t being translated into business lending. Losing the City of London didn’t help much.
4. Europe has fairly few new scale-ups, as most young companies tend to fail to expand for the lack of access to capital and markets.
5. The energy shock isn’t helping. Neither does the fact that outside Central Europe there’s a huge pool of underemployed skilled youth that just doesn’t seem to have been equipped with in-demand skills their economies needed.
6. The US allows immediate write-offs for R&D and most forms of investment as well uses its massive defence procurement to support innovative companies. Whereas EU has a bunch of national and subnational governments with very little interoperability or cohesion. Coupled with depressed defence spending and absence of investment subsidies no wonder the US is ahead.
7. There are places in Europe that are beating the United States or at least come close on productivity. Those are Benelux, the Nordics, and Switzerland. All of which have relatively open markets and strong unions with fairly harmonious labour relations. Driven by highly competitive and contestable markets with moderate social security and ample access to capital (Netherlands, Switzerland). Or by maintaining flexible labour markets coupled with high income security and high public spending to support private investment like the Belgium and the Nordics. Now choose your lane and move.
Europe is not creating neo feudalism as usa does. All of their productivity comes from monopolies. Takes those away and compare productivity then
You don’t need a doctorate in Economics: it’s in the 2nd sentence of the article.. Output *per hour worked*.
God, please tell me it’s bots because this is painful to see.
Single nation with unified language, law, administration vs superficially bundled pack of nations. If the 3rd Reich was successful might be Europe become a superpower.
Why be productive when you can have markets that are heavily influenced and controlled by the state and focus primarily on job security.
What? Wasn’t aware there is a “productivity race”. Who would be the one benefitting from being the winner? Not me and very sure, none of us Reddit dwellers. This is quite clownish.🤡
The active war and looming Russian threat + energy chaos isn’t helping.
EU has a loteral unelected and unaccauntable bureaucrat army of bureaucrats interested only in producing more regulations and bans.
An example better than 1000 words: Americans come up with Chat GPT, Europeans, months later cone uo with first AI regulations in the world.
Pretty sure we are winning the race of enjoying life though.
We should stop this race anyway 21 century need a change of production doctrine
It is not Europeans’ fault. The biggest growths were tech in the last couple of decades which were dominated by US and China. That is simply due to geography. The two countries that have unified language, currency and consumer habits. Even in the EU not everyone is on euro and every country has its own language and culture and demand so it will be harder to scale up something for the European market. Also I think the author for this article got it wrong as is that Europe is only trailing behind in total output. Also keep in mind most EU countries have national healthcare which they do not have in the US. if you deduct the part from US wage the take home pay is similar.
I’m pretty sure a capitalist pig put together some bots to write this garbage article
I’m a USian working in Europe for a couple of years and I think the problem is not really capital but:
– Severe risk aversion.
– Since productivity is tightly bound to technology and software development; in Europe there is a very strong tendency to avoid Agile development practices. They use the correct words and they hire people that use the correct words but I have yet to see it in practice.
– Strong bias towards activity instead of outcome.
– I have never seen a greater use of KPIs for people instead of OKRs. A huge mistake.
– Language and racism. The EU is not making people fast enough and must accept immigration. Even though people can move freely in the EU, languages cannot. This either requires a common language to be used (e.g. English) or a willingness to accept less qualified people that share a culture and language. This is a major recipe for disaster. Culture and language is important; Europe must decide if it is worth decline to make the most important metric.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to every company or country, but it does apply to enough of them.
Because we’re winning the employee wellbeing race.
Can we ban promo-posting from yellow rags, like this exemplary piece of “journalism”?
China is growing and going to beat everyone else without a real free market and with a huge government control in funds and strategic companies. At the end of the story, any other analysis is useless, there is no single economic model to follow. You just throw a lot of money in the market (public or private) and into strategic fields.
Europe went for austerity, this is what you get when you restreint access to investments. We made a big favour to our higher social classes and the US, while hurting most of the population.
Europe is over regulated. It’s very difficult for enterprises, except the very big ones, to bear the costs of all those rules. In fact the EU is broken, made up of bureaucrats who are enemies of progress. The EU should de regulate big time. You do that and China and America are gonna be surpassed in no time, with out know how, well educated people and cultural background. But the people in charge in Bruxelles they have to justify they humongous wages, and since these people are useless, they regulate and regulate and breed bureaucracy after bureaucracy.
Immigration. See the PPP adjusted median GDP per active labor force. US benefits from importing two million people per year, most of working age.
It’s high taxes, low salaries and way too many rules/regulations especially if you want to start a business….at least here in Portugal…..