Why is the Commission proposing EU Inc.? Today, for too many entrepreneurs and innovative companies, expanding across EU borders means navigating a fragmented corporate legal landscape. European companies looking to grow and scale are faced with navigating 27 national legal systems and over 60 company forms. On top of that, many processes still require manual paperwork, in-person appointments, and unnecessary documentation. This can delay the setting-up of a company for weeks or even months, slowing growth, raising costs and discouraging scale. During the...

Capital markets integration, expanding opportunities for workers, and bigger consumer markets will allow companies to grow faster. Europe once led the world in productivity growth but now lags the United States —and the gap has widened significantly in recent years. The Chart of the Week shows that behind this shortfall is the staggering difficulty that European firms face in scaling up. In the United States, the stock market valuation of young firms (under the age of 50) is $42.9 trillion, compared to a...

Today the Council agreed its position on the proposal to streamline certain rules regarding artificial intelligence (AI). The proposal forms part of the so-called “Omnibus VII” legislative package in the EU’s simplification agenda. The package includes proposals for two regulations aiming to simplify the EU’s digital legislative framework and the implementation of harmonised rules on AI. "Streamlining the AI rules is essential for ensuring the EU’s digital sovereignty. As presidency, we worked on this proposal with urgency, reaching a swift agreement to facilitate the timely...

Blog|  Piero Cipollone, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB As payments and financial markets go digital, central bank money must evolve too. Through initiatives such as Pontes and Appia, the Eurosystem is working with market participants to ensure that tokenised finance can settle safely in central bank money, supporting innovation, integration and Europe’s financial sovereignty. Technology is transforming how we communicate, travel, work and pay. The way that central banks issue money also needs to change, to meet the...

Secure transparency, remuneration and the possibility for rightsholders to prevent the use of their protected content in AI training Protect the news media sector to ensure media pluralism and diversity of information Introduce new licensing rules to address potential infringements of copyright law To protect the creative sector in the EU, the use of copyrighted work by artificial intelligence requires transparency and fair remuneration, Parliament says. On Tuesday, MEPs adopted a series of recommendations to protect copyrighted creative work from...

Blog | AI can lift global growth but lasting productivity benefits depend on how fast we learn to measure, finance, and govern it. Artificial intelligence is the defining driver of global economic conversation—and, increasingly, of economic growth itself. In the United States, AI-related investment now accounts for a large share of GDP growth, fueling new demand for servers, data centers, software, and power infrastructure. Policymakers are scrambling to understand what this means: Is the world witnessing a short-lived investment bubble...