Draghi and Stripe’s Collison open the Rhine Group to push the 2024 report

Mario Draghi and Patrick Collison, the co-founder of Stripe, have launched the Rhine Group, a Geneva-registered association of about 55 economists, founders and former officials whose stated job is to stop Europe’s competitive decline and to force movement on Draghi’s 2024 report. Luis Garicano, a Spanish economist and former MEP, is executive director. Draghi and Collison chair it.

The published list includes Nobel economist Philippe Aghion, Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes, former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves, former French finance minister Bruno Le Maire, former Élysée secretary-general Alexis Kohler, French competition chief Benoît Cœuré, Xavier Niel, Andrea Pignataro, Vittorio Colao, Lucrezia Reichlin and Francesco Giavazzi, plus the heads of Shopify, Atomico and Klarna.

Draghi’s line at launch was short: decline is not inevitable, but it is the present direction unless Europe moves. Garicano told Euronews the aim is to make the continent “an innovation superpower.” The European Commission was not a co-author. French and Italian papers called the timing a rebuke to a two-year gap between a celebrated report and thin implementation.

Another group, or a whip

Fabian Zuleeg of the European Policy Centre wrote that Europe does not lack recommendations. It lacks a short list, a coalition of governments and a calendar. If the Rhine Group produces another paper it will join the shelf that already holds Draghi and Enrico Letta. If it names five laws and the capitals that will carry them, it will be something else. That test has not been run. The membership is the first fact. The second is that Draghi chose a payments founder, not a commissioner, as co-chair.