Press

Christian Odendahl and John Springford from the Centre for European Reform argue for more public investment in climate-friendly technologies. “Climate investment has always been a matter of national security. Russia’s war on Ukraine has simply brought this to everyone’s attention,” they write, arguing for more taxes on polluters and on windfall profits, as well as for national and European borrowing.

Russia did not stop fighting after the annexation of Crimea in 2015, but actively supported the separatists in the Donbas, said Mr Ian Bond, a former British diplomat in Russia and head of foreign policy for the Center for European Reform. “I’m a skeptic about the Russians giving up on the war,” he said. “We’ve seen this movie before in 2014 and 2015. I view this as only a pause.”

Avoiding the issue of reducing consumption is doing Europeans a disservice, said Elisabetta Cornago, an energy policy researcher at the Centre for European Reform. “It's failing to actually help consumers make the link between their energy bills, the energy insecurity that we are potentially facing and the war in Ukraine.”
A mix of clear messaging and financial incentives could make voluntary energy-saving “palatable” to consumers, she added. “It might be better to do this than reach a point where you need to actually restrain consumption.” 

Camino Mortera-Martinez, head of the Brussels office of the Center for European Reform, said she worries that the Ukraine crisis will effectively grant Poland a “get out of jail free pass.”She believes the European Commission will unfreeze the money “not because Poland needs it, but because it does not want to risk the unity of the bloc at this moment.”

“This will be the first comprehensive attempt at making digital markets more competitive,” said Zach Meyers, a senior research fellow with the Centre for European Reform think tank. “And when you look at what the UK and the US and other countries are doing, even if they’re not replicating the DMA, they’re certainly inspired and influenced by it.”

The interchange and scheme fee component is typically set by Visa and Mastercard, which compete with each other to offer the best revenue incentives for their customer banks. Hence, if the EPI succeeds, banks will likely lose revenue, said Zach Meyers, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform. This set-up has created several challenges for the EPI, Meyers told VIXIO.

Cited as evidence for this statement [that UK good exports to the EU were down by 18 per cent on 2019 levels] is a report from John Springford, the deputy director of the Centre for European Reform in London. Entitled “The Cost of Brexit: December 2021”, the report found a weak overall UK goods export performance compared to if the UK had stayed in the EU.