The most consequential number in EU competitiveness policy this week comes not from the European Commission but from a Brussels think tank. The European Policy Innovation Council's July 2026 update of its Draghi Implementation Index — the tracker it runs at DraghiWatch.eu, subtitled "From narrative momentum to delivery discipline" — finds that 60 of the Draghi report's 383 recommendations, or 15.7%, have been fully implemented in binding EU law. Another 98 are partially implemented, putting the combined index at 41.3%.
What makes the index useful is its deliberate strictness. EPIC counts only adopted legal acts. Political declarations, Commission communications and legislative proposals — the currency in which Brussels typically reports its own progress — count for nothing until they become law. The July update reviewed 34 legal acts adopted between February and June, 25 regulations and 9 directives, and found that only a handful moved the needle.
The index's movement since January is slight — up 0.6 points on the strict measure and 2.4 on the combined one, a clear slowdown from the 7.5-point jump in the previous cycle — but its pattern is telling. Nearly everything that advanced sits where competitiveness fuses with security: the binding framework for phasing out Russian pipeline gas and LNG, the €90 billion Ukraine Support Loan with €60 billion tied to defence-industrial capacity, steel trade-defence reinforcement, and a new EU rail capacity regulation. Sustainability-reporting simplification also crossed into law, materially narrowing the compliance burdens reaching smaller firms.
The corollary is uncomfortable. The reforms Draghi considered foundational — deeper capital markets, cheaper energy, faster permitting, telecoms scale, genuine single-market integration — remain the weakest performers. Energy is the starkest case in EPIC's sectoral breakdown: of 83 energy-related measures, exactly one is fully implemented. As the report puts it, the EU "is still building architecture more than outcomes" — frameworks, monitoring systems and financing channels rather than results in the market. Europe, in the index's phrase, is still preparing to act at scale; it has not yet consistently acted at scale.
Beneath the numbers sits the report's most pointed institutional argument. Two years into the EU's self-declared competitiveness mandate, there is no official, public, measure-by-measure account of what has actually been delivered. The Commission communicates in proposals launched and packages announced; it does not publish a scoreboard of what has become law. That work is currently done by a nonprofit with a locked methodology and a website. EPIC's remedy is to make the tracking official: a European Competitiveness Act built as a single delivery package with measurable objectives, priority files, a public scoreboard and a binding adoption calendar. The proposal's subtext is hard to miss — if Brussels believes its own competitiveness narrative, it should be willing to measure it in public.
Independent scrutiny of EU delivery is usually episodic: a court report here, an implementation review there, years after the fact. A standing index that reprices the EU's flagship agenda every six months is genuinely new, and its discipline — law counts, announcements don't — is exactly the standard the Commission avoids applying to itself. That gap matters beyond Brussels. Europeans are being asked to accept significant change in the name of competitiveness, and they currently have no official way to see what they are getting for it. Until the Commission publishes its own scoreboard, the measure of Europe's most important economic project will be kept by an outside auditor — and the auditor's ledger says the EU is moving at a fraction of the pace its own diagnosis demands.
