The European Central Bank said the EU could close about one-third of its productivity gap with the United States if it had as many large companies as the US. That’s the whole trick, apparently: make the firms bigger, and the gap narrows. The ECB said the finding points to the need for reforms that make it easier for businesses to scale up, turning a public institution into a cheerleader for corporate expansion and calling it economic strategy.
The State’s Corporate Script
The assessment frames larger firms as a key part of the bloc's effort to narrow the gap with the US economy. In plain language, the Brussels apparatus and its monetary technocrats are treating corporate size as the answer to a political problem they helped build. The language is tidy, managerial, and very familiar: if the market isn’t delivering enough power to enough big players, then the answer is to smooth the path for more power.
The European Central Bank did not describe the productivity gap as something to be solved by workers gaining control over production, or by communities deciding what gets made and for whom. It pointed instead to reforms that make it easier for businesses to scale up. That’s the institutional reflex. When the system stumbles, the system asks for more system.
The comparison with the United States is doing a lot of work here. The ECB said the EU could close about one-third of its productivity gap with the United States if it had as many large companies as the US. The benchmark is not social need, not wages, not housing, not climate, not the people who actually produce the wealth. It’s corporate scale. Bigger firms, bigger concentration, bigger leverage. The usual hymn.
Who Gets the Benefit
The assessment offers no sign that the gains from this scaling-up would be shared by anyone outside the boardroom. It simply says the bloc needs reforms that make it easier for businesses to grow. That’s the language of capitalist architecture: competition, consolidation, and the quiet assumption that what’s good for large firms is good for everyone else. The ECB presents that assumption as neutral analysis.
The result is a familiar European ritual. A central bank identifies a gap, then translates it into a call for reforms that make business more efficient, more expandable, more dominant. The people at the bottom are left with the consequences, while the institutions at the top congratulate themselves for diagnosing the problem in the first place.
The assessment also makes clear how narrow the horizon is. The EU’s productivity gap with the United States becomes a matter of how many large companies the bloc can produce. Not whether those companies should be larger. Not whether the economy should be organized around them at all. Just how quickly the machinery can be adjusted so they can scale up.
That’s the logic of the single market in miniature. Concentration gets dressed up as competitiveness. Corporate growth gets sold as collective progress. And the ECB, one of the continent’s most powerful unelected institutions, supplies the vocabulary.
Brussels, Meet the Boardroom
The assessment frames the issue as part of the bloc's effort to narrow the gap with the US economy, which means the EU’s answer to American dominance is more of the same: bigger firms, more scale, more consolidation, more pressure on everyone else to adapt. The public is told this is about closing a productivity gap. What it really closes is the distance between policy and corporate interest.
The ECB said the finding points to the need for reforms. That word does a lot of heavy lifting in Europe. It usually means making life easier for capital and harder for everyone else, while insisting the result is somehow inevitable. Here, the reform agenda is explicit: help businesses scale up. The institution doesn’t hide the direction of travel. It just expects everyone to nod along.
So the gap remains, the firms get bigger, and the people who actually make the economy run are left out of the frame. The ECB can call that productivity policy. From below, it looks like the same old arrangement, polished for another round.