In the first session, the panellists discussed how to establish a fair and competitive Digital Single Market, in particular a fair and competitive platform economy. Since the crucial factors for success for digital platforms are trust and big data, the trade-off between both determine the efficiency of the entire industry. This trade-off is embodied in privacy, and unfortunately empirically there is no clear-cut answer to how much privacy is needed for people’s welfare. The panellists also discussed the role of competition policy and regulation as complementary tools, one as a credible deterrent and the other as a specific way to tailor policy to social objectives.

For competition policy, several features of the platform economy were highlighted that make the situation particular, notably the winner-take-all markets, the first-mover advantage, the network effect, the cross-markets leverage that scale brings and other bundling. Due to the fragmentation of the EU market, there are cases where national players effectively compete with global ones. All these aspects make the response all the more difficult and while dominant position leads to increased vigilance it is not always beneficial to break dominant players.

The panel also highlighted how self-regulation and purely top-down regulations were both ill-suited for such a fast-moving topic, and instead recommended the use of co-regulation, whereby regulators and stakeholder find pragmatic solutions through continued consultations. Regarding DSM legislative process, some criticized how politicized it had become, shifting away from long-term added-value and evidence-based policies, while others praised the legislators’ openness to input from stakeholders.

This event discussed European development finance architecture and its present and future instruments, in the context of the ongoing global debate. We examined the role of the private sector and explored the implications in terms of suitable business models to support development objectives. In particular, we discussed a development model based on crowding-in private sector

Over the last decade, EU’s greenhouse gas emissions have decreased significantly in all sectors with the only exception of transport. This sector is thus becoming a key obstacle to EU decarbonisation and more aggressive policies are needed to decarbonise it. This event discussed the potential strategies to structurally address this issue, also on the basis of Bruegel’s new policy proposal in the field.

At the end of last century, (just as the European Central Bank was created), a central banking model, broadly based on the experience of independent central banks (like the Bundesbank), prevailed in advanced economies. This model seemed to be validated during the Great Moderation.

The Great Recession imparted some serious hits to that model, with central banks called to take new responsibilities in the monetary policy as well as in the financial stability domains.  A new book by Francesco Papadia and Tuomas Välimäki, to be presented at this event, asks whether these changes require a basic revision of the pre-crisis central bank model. The tentative answer to this question is that adaptations more than radical changes are required (to take into account the lessons of the Great Recession).

We can definitely say that 2018 is going to be a crucial year for the debate on the future of Europe. With the 2019 European Elections fast approaching, it is the time to engage citizens in setting the agenda and discussing different policy options in order to increase the feeling of ownership of the European project, especially among young people.

Bruegel and the European Youth Forum teamed up to organise an event series in which young people, researchers and policy makers debate policy issues relevant to the future of Europe.

This event will discuss the current state of the multilateral trading system and how it might evolve in the future.

2 Robots and artificial intelligence: The next frontier for employment and EU economic policy by BruegelEvents

The advance of artificial intelligence and development of robotics is expected to have a great impact in our society and our economy. On the one hand, automated systems bring many efficiencies in the performance of specific tasks and the operation of markets. On the other hand, their disruptive forces create many challenges for policy makers who have to design an efficient and secure framework so that the benefits for humanity are maximised.

This event will discuss this topic during two sessions. The first session will focus on the impact of industrial robots on EU employment and wages, and will feature the presentation of a new paper by Georgios Petropoulos. The paper looks at these issues using a local market approach similar to the one introduced by Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) for US labour markets.

The second session will discuss the consequences of artificial intelligence on the economy. A panel of experts will evaluate the economic impact of AI and discuss open challenges for the EU industry and economy.

Pension funds are the core of the institutional investment that could support greater financial integration and stimulate long term investment in the EU. The low interest environment and disillusionment with the performance of pension funds has led to a widespread retrenchment of funded schemes, and possibly a move back into the redistributive state systems. In this context the EU Commission in 2017 proposed a new personal pension product that will be portable across the EU.

While the outlook for the European economy has been improving there is still a lot to be concerned about. The geopolitical climate is tense and uncertain. Europe is processing the UK’s decision to leave the Union and the Brexit negotiations are ongoing. Meanwhile the Trump presidency is causing disruptions on the global arena. All of this could derail the process of recovery. While there is talk of further integrating the EU divisions are also apparent, not only between north and south but also the east and west. How can the EU negotiate this uncertain climate and continue on the road to recovery?