To avoid waste and duplication, European countries must coordinate defense spending, regardless of whether America with Joe Biden or Donald Trump in command asks for it.
This is supported by Mario Draghi who spoke at a conference of the National Association for Business Economics in Washington where he was awarded the prestigious Volcker Lifetime Achievement Award.
"There is a strong need to coordinate our defense spending - underlined the former Italian Prime Minister in an interview following his lectio magistralis - to avoid duplication and waste. On the other hand we must invest in some sectors of defense and all this is only possible with a common vision of defense and foreign policy".
The former president of the European Central Bank, about whom rumors have circulated in recent months of a possible candidacy for the presidency of the EU Commission, did not want to go into the merits of the next elections in the United States and clarified that regardless of the next president, whether a "friendly or hostile" partner, Europe must "get a move on" from a defense point of view.
as happened in the fight against climate change where there was greater coordination with the ambitious agenda set by the Commission.
Draghi then addressed the risk of increasingly isolationist policies in the Old Continent, underlining that recent polls do not highlight "radical changes".
On the other hand, the former prime minister specified, "even the toughest isolationists in Europe must realize that each European country is too small on its own".
As for Ukraine and its entry into the EU, the former governor of the Bank of Italy explained that the risk is leaving the country alone after the end of the war.
"Ukraine would be one of the largest members of the European Union with many resources but also with a huge need to rebuild everything that Russia destroyed. The EU today represents Kiev's anchor," he said.
On more strictly economic issues, 'super Mario', who is working on a report on competitiveness in Europe which European Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni said today will be published after the European elections, has outlined a picture of great change in macroeconomic and fiscal policies, in Europe and the world, in a period of greater geopolitical rivalries and more transactive international economic relations.
“Fiscal policy will be called upon to play a more significant role, which means as far as I can expect, persistently higher public deficits,” underlined the former ECB president.
“Fiscal policy will be called upon to increase public investment to meet the range of new investment needs. Governments will need to address inequalities in wealth and income. And, in a world of supply shocks, fiscal policy is likely to finds itself having to also play a greater stabilization role - a role that we had previously attributed mainly to monetary policy", added the former Italian prime minister for whom "there must be a clear and credible fiscal path that focuses on investments and at the same time, in our case, it preserves European social values".
"This - Draghi argued in Washington - would give central banks greater confidence in the fact that public spending today, by increasing supply capacity, will lead to lower inflation tomorrow. In Europe, where fiscal policies are decentralized, we can also go a step further by financing a greater share of investments collectively, at Union level."
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