"There is no EU company with a market capitalisation over EUR 100 billion that has been set up from scratch in the last fifty years."
Mario Draghi said that in Strasbourg on 17 September 2024, when he presented his report on the future of European competitiveness. It remains one of the most quoted lines in the debate, because it is a simple fact about a complicated problem. Europe has plenty of capable companies. It does not grow new giants.
In the same address Draghi pointed to the other side of the problem: "Close to 30% of the 'unicorns' founded in Europe… relocated their headquarters abroad." The founders did not fail. They moved to where money and customers were bigger and easier to reach.
Those two sentences describe what economists call a scale-up gap. Europe produces start-ups, but they struggle to grow into global firms, so the best ones are sold or leave.
EPIC's Draghi Implementation Index, run through its Draghi Observatory at draghiwatch.eu, does not count unicorns. It counts laws. It tracks the report's 383 recommendations and records how many have become binding EU law. That is the right test, because Draghi's argument was that policy, not talent, holds the scale-ups back.
The July 2026 preliminary update has 60 of 383 recommendations fully implemented, or 15.7%. Once partial implementation is added, the figure is 158 of 383, or 41.3%. In the January 2026 interim audit the numbers were 15.1% and 38.9%.
The direction matters as much as the level. The Index shows a clear slowdown: the February–June half-year added 2.4 percentage points to the combined score, against 7.5 points in the September–January half-year. EPIC assessed 34 acts in that period.
EPIC's reading is that the EU moves fastest where competitiveness fuses with security. Defence, the biggest mover in the January audit, rose from 35.7% to 78.6% between the September 2025 baseline and January 2026. The €90 billion Ukraine defence loan became law in the spring.
The slow areas are the structural reforms that force market outcomes: a true Single Market and deeper capital markets, the very conditions that would let a young company grow inside Europe rather than leave it. EPIC's report on Single Market fragmentation, published in July, makes the same observation from a different direction.
The Index also shows who holds the pen. In its first ranking by Commission department, DG TRADE tops the table at 41.7% fully implemented, while DG ENER sits at 2.7% and DG EMPL at 0.0%. The EU delivers where it has exclusive competence and political pressure, and struggles where member states must agree to change their own rules.
Draghi's two numbers are a symptom, and the Index measures the cure. At 15.7% delivered, the reforms that would help Europe grow its own giants are mostly still on paper. None of this proves that more laws would produce a €100 billion firm. It does show how far Europe is from even testing the idea. The next full Draghi review is due later this year. Until then, the July update is the latest dated reading, and it points the same way as the speech: Europe knows what it needs to do and moves slowest on the parts that matter most for growth.
