EconPol Forum

Companies in the EU spend much less on R&D than their competitors in the US and focus their innovation activities on mid-tech rather than high-tech sectors (IT hard-ware, software, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals). Reforms of EU innovation policy are necessary to avoid the “mid-tech trap,” i.e., the traditional dominance of the same companies, especially from the automotive sector.

Both Germany and the US are among the most innovative and entrepreneurially ac-tive countries in the world. Nevertheless, they face different challenges: the strengthening of incremental innovative entrepreneurship in Germany versus the continuous promotion of radical and disruptive entrepreneurship in the US.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised the question of whether the issue of external border security and defense needs to be more closely integrated within the European Union. Many proposals are under discussion aimed at assigning the EU with tasks that are currently performed at national level. Most EU members have increased their defense spending in the past year or plan to do so soon. However, whether an EU defense union is politically achievable remains controversial. It entails additional costs and ‒ even more importantly ‒ the member states would have to give up some of their sovereignty. The project is linked to the plan to build a robust and efficient defense industry. This is because European arms production has so far suffered from national fragmentation and chronic underfunding.

Well-intentioned measures such as polling place reassignments can have unintend-ed consequences, such as a shift from in-person to postal voting and a temporary decline in overall voter turnout. The drop in turnout is due to inattentive voters missing the deadline to apply for an absentee ballot.

This paper examines the impact of different cultural values, attitudes and similar attributes on some of the key dimensions of economic performance. It shows a weak correlation between the relative endowment of continental countries with some cultural attributes and the relative performance of their economies.