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«Son principal atout est son engagement en faveur des principes du marché libre, qui l’a parfois amenée à s’opposer à des intérêts particuliers. Elle a également réussi à convaincre de nombreuses personnes que la Direction générale de la concurrence n’avait pas pour seul objectif d’attaquer les entreprises américaines, mais qu’elle appliquerait la politique de concurrence sans crainte ni faveur, y compris lorsque des entreprises européennes sont visées», analyse Zach Meyers, chercheur en politique de la concurrence au Centre for European Reform.

“The problem here is that the relaxed state aid rules benefit countries like Germany that have low public debt and can afford to lavish subsidies,” Zach Meyers, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform (CER), a think-tank, told Euractiv.

I caught up this week with Charles Grant, the director of Centre for European Reform, for the first time since I commissioned him to write op-eds for the FT during the eurozone debt crisis. Bear in mind, he notes, that while just about everyone in the EU is in favour of multilateralism, given the war in Ukraine and the focus on EU enlargement it is not top of people’s minds.

“There’s a triple-whammy [facing Germany]: higher energy prices, a global environment that’s not conducive to goods trade and the China shock,” said Sander Tordoir, a senior economist at the Centre for European Reform in Berlin. 

This could also erode the future will of ‘frugal’ countries to pool resources or issue EU debt, said economist Sander Tordoir from the Centre for European Reform, who prompted the European Commission to be more open about the RRF pitfalls.“The Commission and member-states have neglected to build genuine consensus beforehand on what would constitute big-picture political success for the RRF,” he told EURACTIV, warning of a backlash.

“Microsoft's arguments may hold some weight,” said Zach Meyers, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, who said the company could reasonably argue that a platform with a 3% market share is not an "important gateway" for businesses. He added that while there may be some concern around Microsoft's vast ecosystem and its aggressive promotion of Bing, the search engine’s low market share illustrates how insurmountable Google's lead is, even with Microsoft throwing everything at it.

John Springford, deputy director at the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank, said: “The revisions are good news. But since 2021 the economy has stagnated — and that followed a period of below-trend growth after the [2016] Brexit referendum. So while the size of the economy is bigger than we thought, Britain still has a growth problem.”