Europe’s Missing Mega‑Champions

Europe’s lagging productivity and weak position in emergent industries (AI, advanced manufacturing) is driven less by welfare states or unions than by the absence of continent‑wide giant firms able to fund radical R&D and scale new technologies — a capability that requires concentrated corporate balance sheets, large VC pools, and strategic state support. The result is that Europe exports mature goods but fails to lead in platformized, high‑capex sectors where scale and long time horizons matter. — If true, this reframes debates about Europe’s decline from blaming policy costs to focusing on the formation of large firms, industrial strategy, competition policy and cross‑border public‑private finance.