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The Daily View: Europe’s got 99 problems, but its ships aren’t one

 

Your latest edition of Lloyd’s List’s Daily View — the essential briefing on the stories shaping shipping

ESTABLISHING blueprints for spending money is the easy bit. Enacting policy tends to be where even the best ideas start to disintegrate.

When Mario Draghi last year spelled out in a 400-page report for the European Commission how to save the EU economy and supercharge green growth in a way that answered the challenges laid down by China and the US, he included the estimated bill.

An annual investment requirement of around €800bn-€900bn was the ballpark.

His economic opus has finally been distilled into a more manageable 27-page policy plan, presented this week by EC president Ursula von der Leyen.

The good news, for shipping at least, is that the direction of policies pledging to raise productivity through innovation, decarbonisation and slashing red tape, are all positive for the maritime sector.

More specifically, shipping retains the prominent namecheck it received in Draghi’s original draft meaning that the forthcoming shipping specific strategies are not getting kicked into the political long grass.

The problem is that we are yet to see any of the detail, and even once that does emerge there is every possibility that the policy plans remain hypothetical, while Europe’s bigger financial and political divisions are tackled.

The EU’s debt crisis and stagnating economies were an issue long before Donald Trump started firing tariff salvos over the Atlantic, but the EU’s response is already looking dangerously slow compared to the blistering pace of reforms in the US.

It’s not that there is any shortage of good ideas here. The creation of a maritime space without barriers, the removal of customs formalities for goods transported by sea intra-EU, the streamlining of external border controls, the harmonisation of rules and the further reduction of bureaucracy — these are all things the industry has been asking for.

If the forthcoming policy can genuinely de-risk investments needed to swiftly scale up the production of renewable and low-carbon fuels for shipping under a new Sustainable Transport Investment Plan, then Brussels should steam ahead with the full support of European shipping’s big beasts behind it.

But the reality is that shipping has heard all this before and the internationally trading shipping executive is more aware than most EU bureaucrats of the economic barriers that lie ahead.

Getting some recognition for the central role that shipping plays in the EU economy is all very flattering, but we knew that already; it’s the politicians who are catching up here.

Von der Leyen’s plan to save the EU economy is a step in the right direction, but it is far from Trump-proof and nobody in shipping board rooms are betting their strategic capital on this plan being the answer to their prayers just yet.

Richard Meade
Editor-in-chief, Lloyd’s List
 

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