Paul Seabright: A Response to the Draghi Report on EU competitiveness

Speaker: Paul Seabright is a Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics.

Format: Professor Seabright will give a 30-minute talk, which will be followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Thibault Schrepel.

Description: Where, geographically, do the benefits of innovative activity accrue? If a highly innovative startup in the EU is highly successful, what kinds of benefits are created and for whom, and how is this different if the same startup relocates to Silicon Valley? In the most innovative sectors, a large share of the benefits accrues to customers (as recent research by Hunt Allcott and others suggests), who may be located anywhere in the world. The Draghi Report is hopeless about this, and much of the current discussion around the importance of keeping manufacturing strong in the EU fails to distinguish between manufacturing that generates real location-specific externalities and manufacturing that merely keeps factories humming.