Europe has pooled its monetary sovereignty and is steadily strengthening fiscal coordination, but a third pillar of economic management, credit policy, has been left to fragment along national lines. Writing for CEPR’s Europe 2050 series, Eric Monnet (Paris School of Economics) argues that credit policy has not disappeared, with EU countries still hosting more than thirty national development banks and public institutions supplying around a third of European venture capital funding. What has been lost is coordination and democratic accountability, a far cry from the ambition behind the European Investment Bank’s founding in the 1957 Treaty of Rome. Monnet points to real costs of this fragmentation: national promotional banks vary enormously in firepower, so new flexibility on state aid for clean technology tends to favour whichever states already have the deepest public balance sheets. His conclusion is that Europe does not need to invent a common credit policy from scratch, since most of the institutions already exist. What is missing is the will to make them visible, coordinate them around shared objectives, and hold them properly to account.
Πηγή: CEPR