"Over time, we will inexorably become less prosperous, less equal, less secure and, as a result, less free to choose our destiny." That was Mario Draghi at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on 17 September 2024, presenting his report on European competitiveness. It is the line everyone quotes, and it contains four promises about what happens if Europe does nothing.
Two years on, there is a way to check which of them the EU has acted on. EPIC's Draghi Implementation Index, published at draghiwatch.eu with the Greek think tank KEFIM and edited by Dr Antonios Nestoras, tracks how many of the report's 383 recommendations have become binding EU law. Its July 2026 preliminary update added something the index had not attempted before: a ranking by directorate-general.
On "less secure," the EU has moved. On "less equal," the score is zero.
DG Trade tops the July 2026 ranking at 41.7 per cent strict implementation. DG Energy sits near the bottom at 2.7 per cent. DG Employment, which owns the report's recommendations on labour markets, skills and social policy, records 0.0 per cent. Not a low number — no number. Nothing in that chapter has become binding law.
The overall picture is more modest than the ranking's top end suggests. Sixty of 383 recommendations meet EPIC's strict test, 15.7 per cent, up 0.6 points since the January 2026 interim audit. Including partial implementation lifts the count to 158, or 41.3 per cent. And the direction of travel is the finding that should worry the Commission most: February to June 2026 added 2.4 percentage points, against 7.5 points in the September 2025 to January 2026 period. Whatever momentum the report generated in its first year has largely gone.
Before treating 0.0 per cent as an indictment, the mechanics deserve stating plainly, because they explain most of the number.
Employment and social policy are the areas where the EU has the least competence. Labour law, wage-setting, pensions and social security remain overwhelmingly national. A recommendation in the Draghi Report addressed to skills or labour mobility often cannot become binding EU law at all, because there is no legal base to make it binding. It has to travel through the European Semester, through recommendations that carry no legal force, or through twenty-seven separate national processes. EPIC's index measures binding law. On that measure, a directorate that mostly cannot legislate will score badly whatever it does.
The index also has a known asymmetry, which EPIC does not hide: it rewards what is legislable. Defence moved from 35.7 per cent to 78.6 per cent between September 2025 and January 2026 — the largest sector jump in the index — partly because defence spending can be moved with instruments the EU already had, and partly because it fused with a security emergency that made unanimity available. Trade scores well for the same structural reason. These are areas where Brussels holds the pen.
So the honest reading of 0.0 per cent is not that DG Employment has been idle. It is that the Draghi Report made recommendations in a domain where the EU's chosen instrument — binding legislation — barely reaches, and nobody built an alternative delivery route.
That defence, though, only goes so far, because the report itself does not treat skills as a side chapter. Draghi's argument is that Europe's productivity gap is a technology-adoption gap, and technology adoption is a workforce question. The €750 to €800bn a year in additional investment the report calls for — an effort Draghi described as "more than double that of Marshall Plan" — is not only capital expenditure. It assumes people who can install, operate and improve what the capital buys.
Read that way, a zero in the labour chapter is not a rounding error in an otherwise reasonable scorecard. It is a gap under the load-bearing wall. Europe is on course to fund the machines and leave the training to the member states, which is roughly the arrangement that produced the gap in the first place.
And it maps onto a pattern EPIC has now identified twice, in this index and in its July 2026 report on single-market fragmentation: the EU moves fastest where competitiveness wears a security badge, and slowest on the structural reforms that force market outcomes. Defence and Ukraine financing had a deadline and a threat. Labour-market reform has neither, and it produces losers who vote.
The September 2026 review — the report's one-year anniversary assessment — will be the first proper test of whether the deceleration is a summer artefact or a trend. Until it lands, the July figures are the current state of the record, and they say the EU has implemented a little over one recommendation in six, and is doing so more slowly than it was.
The more useful question the DG ranking raises is not who is failing. It is whether an index built on binding law is measuring the right thing in the places where the EU cannot pass binding law. If DG Employment can only ever score zero, then the zero is telling us something about the instrument, not the effort — and Europe needs a second scoreboard for the recommendations that will never arrive as a regulation. Draghi warned that Europe would become less prosperous and less equal. The EU has built a good tool for tracking the first. It has not built one for the second.
