EPICENTER

EPICENTER seeks to inform the European policy debate and promote the principles of a free society.

25/08/2026

🇪🇺 Complete the market before subsidising it. The Single Market turned 33 this year and it is still half built. Services trade is fragmented, capital markets stop at national borders, mutual recognition is patchy.

Our Reviving Europe’s Competitive Edge report puts the cost in percentage points of GDP, not decimals. Completing services and integrating capital markets is the largest growth lever Europe has not used.

24/08/2026

Removing regulatory barriers would lead to a more efficient Europe. That is the case which Ľudovít Ódor MEP and Svetla Kostadinova, Executive Director of the Institute for Market Economics, make in this Friday's episode of Conversations in the EPICENTER of the EU.

Their argument runs against the grain of the current debate: governments cannot successfully plan their way to industry champions or accurately pick winning companies. Instead of creating complicated and divergent regulatory systems that hinder economic growth, Europe need structures that allow for faster, cheaper adaptation of new technologies.

Watch the full episode on Friday 28 September!

24/08/2026

Europe’s problem starts after the good idea.

A founder here still meets 27 national company law regimes, a capital market that stops at the border, and rules written for the incumbent they are trying to displace. The outcome is predictable. European founders raise here, then scale somewhere else. That is the conversation on Monday 7 September, with Taavi Rõivas, former Prime Minister of Estonia, and a room of policymakers, think tanks and industry.

Places are limited and registration closes on Friday 4 September. Link in our bio on Instagram.

21/08/2026

🚨📦 Brussels police recently seized more than €420,000 in cash and goods, including thousands of e-ci******es, ci******es and other products, highlighting the growing challenge of illicit trade in the city.

For the latest episode of In Conversation With, we invited Dr. Christopher Snowdon, editor of the Nanny State Index, to discuss how public health policies can drive consumers towards black markets, the influence of pressure groups on policymaking, and the need for evidence-based approaches rather than paternalistic regulation.

Watch the interview on our YouTube channel!

21/08/2026

⚖️ The 28th regime is the test of real simplification.

One optional, digital, EU wide corporate framework, letting startups and scaleups incorporate once and operate across the single market. Our EU Regulatory Observatory scored it 7.5 out of 10, or 7.07 confidence-weighted, its strongest result to date. Deliver it intact and everything else on the simplification agenda looks more credible.

Dilute it and the agenda is optics.

19/08/2026

⚡️ Affordable energy is a policy choice.

European electricity and gas prices sit structurally above those in the United States and the Gulf. The three main drivers are all policy: the tax and levy stack, slow permitting and interconnection, and repeated interventions that blunt the ETS price signal.

Our report Energising Europe: A Market Approach to Clean and Abundant Energy calls for market based reform, technology neutrality, and lower policy costs on every kilowatt hour.

17/08/2026

📋 Repeal is where simplification starts. Simplification that does not reduce obligations is a communications exercise.

Our Speed Over Substance briefing finds the Better Regulation reform confuses speed with quality. Real simplification means four things: repeal, sunset clauses, mutual recognition, and cumulative impact assessments before anything is added to an overlapping regime.

17/08/2026

🌍 Open trade is Europe’s real economic security.

More protectionism, more industrial policy and more strategic autonomy each answer a genuine risk. Taken together they point the wrong way.

Our Trade in a Time of Tariffs report sets out the alternative: get the agreements over the line, resist the reflex to answer tariffs with tariffs, and treat a group of allies trading freely with each other as the structural answer to dependence on rivals.

17/08/2026

🚬 Raise the tax far enough and you grow the black market instead of the revenue.

Across Europe, the countries with the highest to***co excise tend to show the highest illicit trade shares. The Commission has proposed lifting the EU minimum on ci******es to 63 per cent of the weighted average retail price and at least EUR 215 per 1,000, from EUR 90 today, applying from 2028.

Our Lighting Up the Black Market and TTD at a Crossroads briefings warn this will accelerate the illicit market in lower income member states, and that new minimum taxes on safer alternatives will reverse the shift away from ci******es.

17/08/2026

Europe has world class universities, high living standards and a single market of nearly 450 million people. It is not turning any of that into companies that scale.

On Monday 7 September we are hosting an evening of drinks and discussion on why, and on what would actually change it. Joining us is Taavi Rõivas, Prime Minister of Estonia from 2014 to 2016, who ran a country that built a digital state while most of Europe was still consulting on one.

In the room with him, policymakers from the Commission and Parliament, Brussels think tanks, and the people trying to build here. In media partnership with Euractiv. The Merode, Brussels, doors open at 17.30.

Places are limited and registration closes on Friday 4 September. Link in our bio!

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