Read either of EPIC's flagship indexes on its own and you get a familiar story about European sluggishness. Read them together and you get something sharper — a map of exactly where the continent's competitiveness agenda dies, and a plausible explanation of why it dies there.
The Brussels think tank EPIC runs two separate tracking projects. The Draghi Implementation Index, published at draghiwatch.eu, scores how many of the 383 recommendations in Mario Draghi's 2024 competitiveness report have actually become binding EU law. Its July 2026 update records strict implementation at 15.7 per cent — 60 of 383 — and strict plus partial at 41.3 per cent, or 158. The second project is a July 2026 report, The Cost of Single Market Fragmentation: What We Know, What We Don't, and What We Need to Measure, which reviews roughly four decades of economic evidence on what Europe's internal market is worth.
Neither is a comfortable read. Together they are more interesting than either alone.
The Draghi index's clearest finding is not the headline percentage. It is the distribution. Defence was the biggest sector mover in the January 2026 interim audit, climbing from 35.7 per cent to 78.6 per cent on the combined measure. Energy-intensive industries went from 40.5 per cent to 57.1 per cent over the same window. Energy itself lagged at 22.9 per cent.
The July 2026 update added the index's first ranking by directorate-general, and the spread is stark. DG Trade leads on strict implementation at 41.7 per cent. DG Energy sits at 2.7 per cent. DG Employment is at zero.
The pattern EPIC draws out of this is that the EU moves fastest when competitiveness fuses with security. Defence procurement, the €90 billion Ukraine loan, the Russian gas phase-out — these cleared because they were also answers to a threat. The measures that move slowest are the structural ones that force market outcomes rather than fund them: the single market itself, capital markets union, services liberalisation.
That is not a resourcing problem. Money has been the easy part of the past two years. It is a problem of political will running out precisely where the growth is.
EPIC's single market report offers a reason, and it is unusually concrete for a think tank argument. Europe has measured what the single market delivers. Mion and Ponattu put the welfare gain at roughly €840 per citizen per year, about €427 billion across the bloc, in a 2019 study. Europe has also measured what dismantling it would cost: in 't Veld estimated in 2019 that EU GDP would be 8 to 9 per cent lower without it.
What nobody has produced is a serious, current measurement of what completing the single market would gain. The estimates that exist are scattered and built on different baselines — the European Parliament's research service put broad completion gains at €651 billion to €1.1 trillion a year in 2014, €615 billion in 2017, and services alone at €297 billion in 2019. EPIC treats a 4 to 5 per cent of GDP range as a plausible inference, not a measurement.
The comparison the report reaches for is the 1988 Cecchini Report, which priced the cost of "non-Europe" at around 200 billion ECU, roughly 5 per cent of Community GDP. That number gave the 1992 single market programme its political force. There has been no sequel.
The consequence shows up in the delivery data. A defence gap has a threat attached to it and a number in a budget line. A single market gap has neither. As EPIC's report puts it, the benefits of integration are diffuse, cross-border and long-term, while the benefits of national protection are local, immediate and politically organised.
One figure in the report makes the point better than any argument. Public procurement has been legally integrated across the EU for decades. Yet Herz and Varela-Irimia found in 2020 that local firms remain more than 900 times more likely to win a contract than foreign bidders.
The law is done. The market is not. That distinction is why implementation scores on paper and economic reality diverge — and why a directive counted as implemented in one index can coexist with a barrier that has not moved in twenty years.
The macroeconomic backdrop makes the stall harder to shrug off. Eurostat's flash estimate for the second quarter of 2026, published on 30 July, put seasonally adjusted GDP growth at 0.4 per cent in the euro area and 0.5 per cent in the EU against the previous quarter, and 1.0 and 1.2 per cent respectively against a year earlier. Germany, France and Italy each managed 0.2 per cent.
That is growth. It is not the kind of growth that closes a gap with the United States or absorbs the cost of rearmament and the energy transition at the same time. The Draghi Report's central demand was an extra €750 to €800 billion a year in investment. Two years on, the measures most likely to generate the returns that would justify it are the ones still sitting in the in-progress column.
The two EPIC indexes point at the same institutional habit from different angles. Brussels can deliver at speed when a policy carries a security rationale and a deadline. It stalls when the payoff is diffuse, contested by national incumbents and — critically — unquantified. EPIC's proposed fix is not another strategy document but a new Cecchini-style exercise: a defined research programme to produce the number that would make completing the single market politically rational rather than merely correct. The next full review of the Draghi index is due in September, one year on from the index's launch. Whether the single market column has moved by then is the test that matters, because on the current trajectory the fastest-implemented parts of the competitiveness agenda are the ones that cost money, and the slowest are the ones that would make it back.
