Competition or competitiveness? At the intersection of competition and industrial policy

This session focuses on the interplay between industrial strategy and competition policy. More specifically, our participants debate how the industrial strategy and geoeconomic conditions may shift policymaking away from traditional regimes towards new economic fundamentals and policy frameworks.   

This has already started to happen to some degree in the EU and the UK, with the Digital Markets Act and Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, and with Donald Trump’s transactional and often country-specific, industry-specific, or product-specific trade practices.  

The era of pervasive AI is further complicating the picture, especially as the impact on both competition and trade remains highly speculative. In the EU, the Draghi report urged aligning competition, trade and industrial policies, but no coherent efforts have yet been made to this end.   

A recent report by Arjona-Gracia and Sauri Romero (2026) outlines avenues to build complementarity between competition and industrial policy. Recent works by the OECD and by think tanks like CEPS and IDDRI go in a similar direction. In this session, the authors of these works compare their views and work towards building a blueprint for the EU’s future industrial strategy.