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Written by Tristan Marcelin.

Following Mario Draghi’s report on the future of European competitiveness, the EU has started proposing ways to simplify EU laws governing the digital space. The goal is to reduce administrative burdens on companies. However, simplifying EU digital laws may not be sufficient to boost innovation, and thus competitiveness.

EU competitiveness as a new priority Future of European competitiveness

Following a request by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Mario Draghi – former European Central Bank President – drafted a report in 2024 on the future of European competitiveness. In his report, Draghi suggests, among other things, increasing EU digitalisation and the development of advanced technologies to boost EU competitiveness. The report notes that the EU should develop its connectivity, computing infrastructures, and electronics value chain, as all three are essential for EU citizens and businesses. It also suggests a number of ways to strengthen EU governance, including by simplifying rules. It warns that ‘excessive regulatory and administrative burden can hinder the ease of doing business in the EU and the competitiveness of EU companies’. The unclear overlaps between the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) are given as an example.

New EU political priorities

Since the publication of the Draghi report, the European political landscape has changed. In 2024, a new legislative term started in the European Parliament, and a new College of Commissioners was appointed for the European Commission. The Commission’s new leadership chose competitiveness as one of its 2024‑2029 priorities, and laid down objectives including ‘making business easier’ and ‘boosting productivity with digital tech diffusion’ to achieve this goal. Both objectives follow Mario Draghi’s recommendations. The latter appears even more relevant in 2025, as this year’s Nobel prize in economic sciences was awarded to three economists for showing ‘how new technology can drive sustained growth’.

From strategic objectives to concrete proposals Digital simplification on the Council’s agenda

In a June 2025 document, the Polish Presidency of the Council noted its priority of simplifying digital regulations, listing the initiatives it undertook. The current Danish Presidency aims for a similar priority. The Danish programme notes that ‘the Presidency will place focus on regulatory simplification and better regulation in the EU to ease daily operations for businesses and other stakeholders’. Under Denmark’s Presidency, the Council defined its position on a Commission proposal, known as the ‘omnibus IV‘ simplification package, to reduce administrative burdens for small and medium-sized enterprises and small mid-cap enterprises (SMCs). The proposal includes modifications to the GDPR: SMCs would no longer need, under certain conditions, to maintain records of activities involving the processing of personal data.

Forthcoming proposal for a digital omnibus

An omnibus dedicated to the EU digital rulebook is reportedly expected for 19 November 2025. The call for evidence, published by the Commission on 16 September 2025, hints at an omnibus focusing notably on simplifying data legislation, cybersecurity incident reporting obligations, and the smooth application of AI Act rules. The forthcoming omnibus is aimed at reducing ‘the administrative costs for compliance for businesses, administrations and citizens in the European Union in application of several regulations of the Union’s digital acquis without compromising the objectives of the underlying rules’. It follows a period of intense political discussions over a pause or simplification of parts of the AI Act, owing to its difficult transposition into technical guidance and standards, and its interplay with other rules.

Burden of a fragmented EU digital rulebook Fragmented EU digital rulebook

The EU digital rulebook is composed of several pieces of legislation that all have different purposes and scopes. Among the horizontal digital laws, (i) several are related to data, while (ii) others focus on specific digital activities. The first include the GDPR, which has created rights for EU citizens over their data. Further laws such as the Data Act and the Data Governance Act set rules for private, public and non-personal data. The second include laws creating obligations for certain types of digital activities, such as the Digital Markets Act for practices relating to digital markets, the Digital Services Act for digital services, and the AI Act for AI systems and models. It also includes technical and organisational cybersecurity obligations relating to software, hardware and entities, such as the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and the NIS 2 Directive. In addition to the horizontal digital laws, sectoral laws may apply. For instance, in 2024, experts divided the 154 EU ‘information security’ and ‘cybersecurity’ policies (including non-legislative texts) into eight policy areas including energy, economic, education, and security and justice.

Administrative burden on companies

The administrative tasks companies must undertake to comply with EU laws depend on their activities. Companies handling personal data must comply with GDPR rules. Once enforced, companies distributing and manufacturing devices might need to comply with the CRA, and those providing general-purpose AI (GPAI) might need to comply with the AI Act. A company could need to comply with all three. However, each law has different deadlines, reporting procedures and authorities. The GDPR and the CRA are enforced at Member State level, while the exclusive power to enforce GPAI rules rests with the Commission. If a company provided high-risk AI systems instead of GPAI, enforcement would be at the national level. The GDPR, CRA and AI Act thus all rely on different enforcers. Depending on the law and its implementation, Member States may have added requirements on top of the initial EU law – this is known as ‘gold plating‘. The Draghi report associates it with a loss in competitiveness, mentioning the GDPR as an example: its enforcement is uneven among the Member States, limiting cross-border innovation.

Beyond simplifying the EU digital rulebook

While simplifying the EU digital rulebook is a first step, it is unlikely to be sufficient to boost EU innovation, and thus competitiveness. In 2024, Anu Bradford – known for theorising the Brussels effect, whereby the EU’s regulatory power influences other regions – published a research paper, ‘The False Choice Between Digital Regulation and Innovation’. As reported by the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, she ‘noted that there was very little technological regulation in Europe before 2010, at the time when the likes of Meta and Google have been founded. This suggests that regulation was not the major obstacle preventing the rise of similar companies in Europe.’ Experts often mention the absence of a digital single market and of a unified capital market in Europe as one of the root causes of the EU’s technological gap.

Read this ‘at a glance’ note on ‘Simplifying EU digital laws for competitiveness‘ in the Think Tank pages of the European Parliament.

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By Danny Bradlow
PRETORIA, South Africa, Nov 20 2025 (IPS)

The end of South Africa’s G20 presidency does not mean the end of its ability or responsibility to promote the issues it prioritised during 2025. It can still advocate for action on some of these issues through its further participation in the G20 and in other international and regional forums.

In this article, I argue that going forward South Africa should prioritise the financial challenges confronting Africa that it championed in 2025.

South Africa established four overarching priorities for its G20 presidency. Two of them dealt with finance. One sought to “ensure debt sustainability for low-income countries”. The other was to mobilise finance for a just energy transition.

The importance of debt, development finance and climate to Africa’s future is clear. Over half of African countries are either in debt distress or at risk of being in distress. More than half of Africa’s population live in countries that are spending more on servicing their debt than on health and/or education.

In addition, 17 African countries experienced net debt outflows in 2023. This means that they were using more foreign exchange to pay their external creditors than they received in new debts that could be used to finance their development. The continent is also experiencing extreme weather events that are adversely affecting food security and human wellbeing.

In short, African countries are caught in a vicious cycle. The impacts of climate and their struggle to meet their debt obligations are interacting in ways that undermine their ability to meet their sustainable development goals.

South Africa’s priorities

South Africa’s priorities for its G20 presidency were ambitious. Success required meaningful action at three levels:

Awareness. South Africa would need to bring the international community to a better understanding of the nature of the debt and development finance challenges confronting African countries and of the consequences of failing to address them.

Process. South Africa would need to convince the G20 to correct the shortcomings in the Common Framework it had devised to deal with low-income countries seeking debt relief.

The examples of Zambia and Ghana showed that the Common Framework was cumbersome, slow and unduly favourable to creditors. For example, the framework requires the debtor to engage separately with each group of its creditors in a sequential process. This means that it should not negotiate with its commercial creditors until it has successfully negotiated with its official creditors.

Commercial creditors can’t give debt relief until the official creditors are satisfied with their deal and are confident that the commercial creditors will not receive more favourable treatment from the debtor than they have received.

Another complication is the IMF’s multiple roles in debt restructurings as an advisor to and a creditor of the debtor countries. In addition, it does the debt sustainability analysis that determines the amount of debt relief that all other creditors are expected to provide to the debtor country in order for it to regain debt sustainability.

The more optimistic its assessment, the smaller the contributions the various creditors, including the IMF, are expected to provide. These contributions can either be in the form of new funding or new debt terms.

Substance. The current debt restructuring process treats debt as a technical financial and legal problem rather than as the complex multifaceted problem that is experienced by debtor countries. The former perspective limits the scope of debtor-creditor negotiations to the terms of the financial contracts.

The negotiations focus on the adjustments that must be made to these terms because the debtor cannot comply with its originally accepted obligations. They treat as largely outside the scope of the discussions the adverse impact the debt situation has on the sovereign debtor’s other legal obligations and on the social, political, environmental and cultural situation in the debtor country.

This approach in effect leaves the debtor to deal with these other issues on its own. This artificial distinction between the debtors’ other legal obligations and those it owes to its creditors makes it very difficult for the debtor to escape the vicious debt, development and climate cycle in which it is trapped. It forces it to choose between its commitments to its creditors and its development obligations.

Over the course of 2025, South Africa has been very effective in raising awareness of the African debt crisis and its dire impact on African countries. South Africa persuaded the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors to issue a declaration on debt sustainability at the end of their October meeting.

The declaration is the G20’s eloquent acknowledgement of the problem and of the need for more discussion of how these debt issues are managed by both debtors and creditors. Unfortunately, it does not contain any firm G20 commitments on what it will do to remedy the situation.

There has not been substantial progress at the process and substance levels. This is unlikely to change in the remaining weeks of South Africa’s G20 presidency.

But there are three actions that South Africa can take beyond the end of its term to ensure that the African debt crisis continues receiving attention.

Three actions

First, it should ask a group like the African Expert Panel that it established to advise the president to prepare a technical report that identifies and analyses all the barriers to Africa accessing affordable, sustainable and predictable flows of external development finance.

This report should be submitted to the South African president in the first half of 2026. Next year, South Africa will still be a member of the G20 Troika, which consists of the current, immediate past and the incoming G20 presidents.

Consequently, next year, it will still be able to table the report at the G20. South Africa can also use the report to promote action in other appropriate regional and global forums.

Second, South Africa and the African Union should create an African Borrower’s Club that is independent of the G20. This club should be a forum in which African sovereign debtors can share information and lessons learned about negotiating sovereign debt transactions and about responsible debt management. When appropriate, the club can work with regional African financial institutions.

The club, working with regional organisations like the African Legal Support Facility, can also sponsor workshops in which interested African sovereign debtors can share information and more critically assess their financing options. They can also work to improve their bargaining capacity in sovereign debt transactions.

The African Borrower’s Club should also be mandated to establish an African Sovereign Debt Roundtable that is modelled on the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable. This entity should be an informal forum, based on the Chatham House Rule in which the various categories of stakeholders in African debt can meet to discuss the design of a sovereign debt restructuring process that is effective, efficient and fair and that adopts an holistic approach to a sovereign debt crisis.

Third, South Africa should capitalise on the fact that the impacts of climate, inequality, unemployment and poverty on Africa’s development prospects are now acknowledged to be macro-critical, and so within the IMF’s macro-economic and financial mandate. South Africa should call for a review of the IMF’s operating principles and practices and its governance arrangements.

This call should note that the multilateral development banks have been the object of G20 review for a number of years and that this has resulted in important enhancements in their capital frameworks and operating practices.

On the other hand, the IMF has not been subject to a similar review despite the fact that its operations have had to undergo possibility even more extensive revisions.

Daniel D. Bradlow is Professor/Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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