2025-02-17
1 小时 27 分钟Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
Good evening everyone.
It's a great pleasure for me to welcome you to this joint public lecture hosted by the Gagnada Blanche Centre and part of the Department of Geography and Environment Sustainability Public Lectures.
My name is Andrés Rodríguez Posse and I am the Principal Studies Chair, I know it's a mouthful,
and a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics and I am also the Director of the Gagnada Blanche Centre here at the LSE.
Now, for all of you that are here,
if you hadn't noticed and perhaps some of you have been locked in a soundproof chamber for the past few days,
Europe is at a massive crossroads right now and this week much more than what it was last week.
And not the kind of crossroads where you can just take a casual left turn and hope for the best.
This is more like one of those high stakes,
multi-lane intersections where hesitation is fatal and the wrong move could send us straight into incoming traffic.
For Europe, there are several hard truths that we have to be confronted with.
The first one is that Europe has got a competitiveness problem and we just have to see the Dragon Report.
In 2000, the EU accounted for about 25% of the global economy.
We fast forward 25 years to today in 2025 and that figure has dropped to just 16%.
This is not just a rounding error.
This is a significant loss of economic muscle and with it of Europe's ability to influence the rest of the world.
Second, this relatively sluggish economic performance is fueling inequality.
Today in the European Union,