Fredrik Erixon

Covid-19 and its broader implications have highlighted the importance of Europe’s digital transformation to ensure Europeans’ social and economic well-being. It provides important new learnings about Europe’s quest for “technology sovereignty”. While the debate about technology sovereignty is timely, the precise meaning of sovereignty or autonomy in the realm of technologies remains ambiguous. It should be noted that the political discussions about...

There is now a long history of countries improving sustainability standards in most parts of the economy while at the same time pursuing the ambitions of rules-based international trade and economic integration with other countries. It is not surprising that countries at the vanguard of sustainability also tend to be the countries that are most open to trade. This Report looks closer at the interplay between the formulation of domestic standards and provisions...

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...