On 29 January 2025, the Commission presented the “Competitiveness Compass”, the first major initiative of this mandate providing a strategic and clear framework to steer the Commission's work. The Compass sets a path for Europe to become the place where future technologies, services, and clean products are invented, manufactured, and put on the market, while being the first continent to become climate neutral.

Three core areas for action: innovation, decarbonisation and security. Five horizontal enablers for competitiveness. 

1. Simplification: this enabler aims at reducing drastically the regulatory and administrative burden. It also involves a systematic effort to make procedures for accessing EU funds and making EU administrative decisions simpler, faster, and lighter.
2. Lowering barriers to the Single Market: to improve its functioning across all industries, a Horizontal Single Market Strategy will modernise the governance framework, removing intra-EU barriers and preventing the creation of new ones.
3. Financing competitiveness: the Commission will present a European Savings and Investments Union to create new savings and investment products, provide incentives for risk capital, and ensure investments flow seamlessly across the EU.
4. Promoting skills and quality jobs: to ensure a good match between skills and labour market demands, the Commission will present an initiative to build a Union of Skills focusing on investment, adult and lifelong learning, future-proof skills creation, skill retention, fair mobility. 
5. Better coordination of policies at EU and national level. The Commission will introduce a Competitiveness Coordination Tool, which will work with Member States to ensure implementation at EU and national level of shared EU policy objectives, identify cross-border projects of European interest, and pursue related reforms and investments.

For more information, see link below (source).

Source: European Commission

Published: March 2025