23 September 2026
Europe has world-class industrial, scientific and technological assets, but it continues to suffer from significant internal fragmentation, which limits its ability to attract and deliver investment at global scale.
This is one of the key findings of the Study “Investing in the EU – A Roadmap to strengthen Europe’s Investment Attractiveness and Competitiveness”, developed by TEHA Group with the support of Amazon, which analyses the structural factors shaping Europe’s investment attractiveness. A preview of the findings were presented with the Study “Unlocking the future: high-tech investments for Italian competitiveness”, developed by TEHA, Amazon and AWS and presented at the 52nd TEHA Forum in Cernobbio.
Fragmentation within the Single Market is estimated to cost the EU around €120 billion in foregone investment every year, even before considering the wider effects on productivity, supply chains and technology diffusion. The challenge is even more significant given the need to mobilise around €600 billion in additional annual investment between 2025 and 2030: €150 billion for physical infrastructure, €300 billion for energy infrastructure and €150 billion for digital infrastructure.
Infrastructure and energy
The main weakness of Europe’s infrastructure is not necessarily the quality of domestic networks, but the limited effectiveness of cross-border connections. Rail links between European countries are on average 23.4% slower than comparable domestic connections. Energy is another key competitiveness factor. In 2024, 71.1% of EU electricity generation came from low-carbon sources, yet in the first quarter of 2025 electricity prices for European businesses were still 2.8 times higher than in the United States. Deeper integration of European electricity markets could generate benefits of up to €43 billion per year by 2030.
Digital infrastructure and institutional capacity
Europe’s digital competitiveness increasingly depends on the availability of cloud infrastructure, data centres, computing capacity, interoperable systems and cybersecurity. The gap in advanced computing remains significant: in 2025, the most powerful US supercomputer alone provided computing capacity equivalent to almost half of the EU’s total HPC capacity. At the same time, institutional quality varies significantly across Member States: on the Government Effectiveness Index, the gap between the best-performing country, Denmark (91.0 points), and the lowest-performing one, Bulgaria (52.2 points), reaches 38.8 percentage points. A one-standard-deviation improvement in the Institutional Delivery Index is associated, within two years, with a 2.4 percentage-point increase in gross fixed capital formation as a share of GDP.
Skills, demography and labour markets
Europe also faces a growing human-capital challenge. By 2050, the EU could lose around 30 million workers, while today 75% of employers report difficulties in filling vacancies. Labour mobility also remains limited: only 3.8% of working-age EU citizens live in another Member State, highlighting how far Europe still is from a fully integrated labour market.
A roadmap for a genuine European investment market
The central message of the Study is that Europe does not lack assets; rather, it struggles to connect them and bring them to scale. The objective is to turn the Single Market into a genuinely integrated, predictable and interoperable investment environment, capable of leveraging national diversity while competing globally for capital, technology and strategic investment.
Documents
Study - Investing in the EU – A Roadmap to strengthen Europe’s Investment Attractiveness and Competitiveness (in English)
Executive Summary (in English)