Economists and start-up founders to reform the EU: the Rhine Group is launched

 In July 2012, Mario Draghi needed just one sentence to halt speculation on the euro. The 400-page report bearing his name, commissioned by the Commission in 2024, did not have the same disruptive effect on the European economy: the divisions between Member States were too deep and the political capacity to push through reforms too weak. So the former ECB President decided to try a new approach to reviving Europe: a think tank. 

Bringing together decision-makers, academics and industry leaders to discuss and find solutions to revitalise Europe. This is how the Rhine Group came into being: a new initiative established in Geneva under the leadership of Draghi and Patrick Collison, the Irish CEO of the online payments company Stripe (valued at around 135 billion euros), and directed by Luis Garicano, a Spanish economist at the London School of Economics.

The organisation will work behind closed doors under the strict Chatham House Rules to ensure maximum freedom of discussion. Those who have accepted the invitation, as stated in the initiative’s manifesto, come from different fields and hold different views, but share international standing and – as Garicano emphasised in X – a desire to pursue European reforms and the Draghi agenda. Seated around the table will be two Nobel laureates in economics: the Frenchman Philippe Aghion, recognised for his studies on the relationship between technological innovation and economic growth, and the Finn Bengt Holmström, renowned for his contribution to contract theory, alongside other scholars from the institutional sphere, such as Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, who until two months ago was chief economist at the IMF, and Benoît Coeuré, a former member of the ECB’s Executive Board who now heads the French Competition Authority. Representing the private sector will be the top executives or founders of major European companies: from the technology giant Siemens to the Spanish bank BBVA, from fintech firms such as Klarna to telecoms companies such as Iliad, as well as various venture capitalists. Alongside them will be the heads of Bruegel and the CEPR, Europe’s two leading economic research centres, accompanied by the presence – unusual for a club that works behind closed doors before publishing its studies – of two newspaper editors: Roula Khalaf of the Financial Times and Zanny Minton Beddoes of The Economist.

Europe, as the Rhine Group itself acknowledges, “is in a more difficult position” than when the Draghi Report was published – because since that September 2024, when those 400 pages were delivered to Brussels, too little has been done whilst the world around it has not been waiting. The Draghi Observatory of the European Policy Innovation Council estimates that by July, only 60 of the 383 recommendations surveyed (15.7 per cent) had been fully implemented, with the index having risen by just 0.6 percentage points over the last six months. The energy sector, for example, has completed just one measure out of 83, whilst in the field of competition, none of the seven recommendations have been completed. Using broader criteria, the Institut Montaigne estimates an average progress rate of 30 per cent up to May 2026. The European Commission, which had commissioned that report, for its part claims that 90 per cent of the flagship initiatives in its Competitiveness Compass stem from those 400 pages. In any case, the overall impression remains that of a sluggish economy. Growth remains low: in the second quarter of this year, the eurozone’s GDP rose by just 1 per cent compared with a year earlier.

“Decline is not inevitable, but it is the direction we are heading in if we do not act urgently” – reads the Rhine Group’s manifesto – despite the fact that “for decades, a favourable global environment has cushioned this decline”: trade grew within a framework of multilateral rules, whilst the American security umbrella freed up defence budgets. These interdependencies seemed mutual “and therefore harmless”, but today they can no longer be regarded as such. The United States has imposed the highest tariffs since the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 – perhaps the pinnacle of American protectionism – whilst China has now “become a fiercer competitor, both in third-country markets and within Europe itself”. “In every emerging technology that will shape the coming decades, Europe is weak,” reads the think tank’s opening page. “The European growth model is fading, and we are increasingly at the mercy of external events beyond our control.”

This is why “European citizens are calling on their leaders to look beyond day-to-day concerns towards a shared future”, and the group aims to be “one of the places where that work begins”, operating in the space between identifying challenges and implementing solutions.