Fredrik Erixon

After the failed merger of Alstom and Siemens – the two giants of Europe´s railway manufacturing sector – the French and the German governments presented a manifesto with a set of radical proposals designed to reshape EU industrial and competition policy. In an article addressed to all European citizens, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, urged for reform of EU competition policy, to protect Europe from foreign competition. MEP Guy Verhofstadt, the...

Members of the European Union have different positions on matters of digital openness, and those differences typically reflect how the digital sector sit in national economies and the relative size of digital endowments. In this paper, we work with three groups of countries – digital managerialists, digital frontrunners, and digital convergers. These groups have gradually emerged over time and they think differently about the politics of reforms to open the...

Digitization has been a boon to the European economy. However, the Digital Single Market remains an aspiration rather than a reality, and European institutions and Member-State governments have to redouble their efforts in the next years to create better and larger space for the digital economy to grow. Even if there is a great deal of variation between the performance of different EU economies, the EU is trailing behind many other economies and could increase the...

There have been calls to exclude certain products from trade agreements because they cause damages to public health or the environment. Lately, campaigns for product exclusions have included chemicals (generally or specific chemicals like glyphosate), sugary drinks and candy (or sugar generally), and alcoholic beverages. Previously the same case has been made for tobacco products. In this paper, it is argued that product exclusions are neither legally feasible nor...