In Strasbourg on 17 September 2024, presenting his report on European competitiveness, Mario Draghi said: “Close to 30% of the ‘unicorns' founded in Europe… relocated their headquarters abroad.”
Two years on, that line has a score attached to it. EPIC's Draghi Implementation Index, published at draghiwatch.eu under editor Dr Antonios Nestoras, tracks how many of the report's 383 recommendations have become binding EU law. Its July 2026 preliminary update puts strict implementation at 15.7 per cent — 60 of 383 — and 41.3 per cent, or 158, once partial delivery is counted. In the January 2026 interim audit the same figures were 15.1 per cent and 38.9 per cent.
The more interesting number in that update is the pace. Between February and June 2026 the index moved 2.4 percentage points. Between September 2025 and January 2026 it moved 7.5. Delivery is decelerating, and it is decelerating unevenly.
The July update also carried the index's first ranking by directorate-general. DG TRADE sits top at 41.7 per cent strict implementation. DG ENER is at 2.7 per cent. DG EMPL is at zero. In the January audit, defence was the standout mover, going from 35.7 per cent to 78.6 per cent in four months — the single fastest advance anywhere in the file.
EPIC's own reading of that pattern, echoed in its Single Market Fragmentation work, is that the EU moves fastest where competitiveness fuses with security, and slowest on the structural reforms that force market outcomes. Single market and capital markets integration are named among the weakest on delivery.
The explanation is not political will. It is instruments.
Defence could be delivered with the tools the Commission actually holds: a €90 billion loan facility, joint procurement schemes, industrial programmes, money moved through the budget. Those are regulations and Council decisions. They can be drafted, agreed and counted, which is exactly what an implementation index counts.
A capital market cannot be assembled that way. What makes one is insolvency law, securities law, the tax treatment of equity versus debt, pension design and a supervisor with real authority over cross-border activity. Nearly all of it sits with member states, most of it is either unanimity territory or so close to national fiscal choice that no directive has ever moved it far. Draghi's unicorns did not leave because Europe lacked a funding programme. They left because a company that wants deep equity, an exit and a listing has found for thirty years that the deepest venue is somewhere else.
The Commission's answer is the Savings and Investments Union, presented in March 2025, which folded two long-running projects — completing the banking union and strengthening capital markets — into one framework. Ursula von der Leyen named it again last Thursday in Paris, listing it among six fronts alongside competition with China, completing the single market, energy, artificial intelligence and trade agreements, and saying that Mario Draghi had shown the way and the ambition was to make Europe a continent that produces, invests and protects.
Set the speech beside the workplan. For 2026 the SIU agenda includes a review of the EuVECA regulation by the third quarter, to widen the range of investable assets and strategies under the label; measures by the same deadline to help investors exit private companies, possibly through intermittent multilateral trading in private shares; a PEPP review on which the Council agreed its negotiating position in June, aimed at simplifying rules and easing online distribution of the pan-European pension product; and a report assessing the competitiveness of the banking sector in the single market. The overall mid-term review lands in the second quarter of 2027.
None of that is trivial and none of it is wasted. But read against the sentence Draghi actually spoke, it is plumbing. A better venture-capital label and a simpler personal pension product are not the reason a European unicorn moves its headquarters to New York.
Two objections deserve stating, because both have force.
The first is against the index. An instrument that scores binding EU law will systematically understate a project like the SIU, because the largest single lever — a genuinely consolidated European supervisor — is a treaty-adjacent fight rather than a regulation. A file where the Commission has little competence will always look like failure on a scoreboard built to measure legislation, and EPIC does not pretend otherwise; the same asymmetry is why DG EMPL scores zero.
The second is against the impatience. The Commission never promised the SIU would be finished by 2026. It published a strategy with a sequenced workplan and a mid-term review in 2027, which is honest project management rather than delay. Judging it at the halfway point of its own timetable is judging it early.
What survives both objections is narrower and harder. The index is not asking whether the Commission tried. It is asking what became law. On that test, the problem Draghi named in one sentence in 2024 still has no legal answer, and the answer that is scheduled arrives after the index has published two more updates.
EPIC's next full review lands in September 2026, one year after the index launched. It will be the first proper test of whether the deceleration between February and June was a summer effect or a trend, and whether anything in the capital-markets column has moved from intention into law.
The wider point is about what Europe finds easy. Defence went from a third to three-quarters implemented in four months because the threat was legible, the money was available and the instruments were to hand. Capital markets have gone almost nowhere over a decade and a half because the work is unglamorous, domestic and slow, and because every step requires a finance ministry to give something up. The Draghi report treated competitiveness and security as one argument. Europe's delivery record so far shows it has only really accepted half of it.
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