The European Commission’s EU Inc. proposal is intended to make company formation, financing and cross-border growth easier. Under the proposal, company-law procedures would be largely digital. Where the EU model articles are used, a company could be incorporated within 48 hours at a cost of no more than EUR 100. On this basis, the Commission’s impact assessment estimates administrative savings.
A recent economic assessment by DIW Econ for the German Federal Chamber of Notaries assesses the claimed benefits of EU Inc. using a broader cost framework from the company-level, institutional and procedural perspectives. The assessment finds no robust evidence that EU Inc. would deliver the expected cost advantages in Germany.
A formation using the EU model articles of association may initially appear cheaper. However, the underlying need for substantive legal review and advice remains, and some of this work shifts to other actors and to later stages of the company life cycle. As a result, total costs for companies and legal transactions can be higher than under the current framework. In addition, weakening existing notarial safeguards against money laundering carries substantial opportunity costs. These follow-on costs were not adequately reflected by the European Commission. The proposed framework, moreover, leaves key bottlenecks in the formation process untouched. What matters to companies is when they can actually start doing business. This is not automatically shortened by faster registration. An economically efficient EU Inc. should simplify procedures where administrative burdens can genuinely be avoided, while retaining review and safeguarding functions that prevent costs from arising later.
The EU Methane Regulation, adopted in 2024, aims to reduce methane emissions from the production and supply of oil, natural gas and coal. Beyond introducing new requirements for monitoring and reducing emissions within the EU, it progressively extends these obligations to imported fossil fuels. This is particularly important as more than three quarters of the methane emissions associated with European fossil-fuel consumption occur outside the EU. As political pressure to delay or weaken the Regulation grows, a new DIW Econ study examines its potential societal benefits and the costs of implementation.
The findings show that the societal benefits of the Regulation could exceed its costs by a factor of 14. Under full and timely implementation, assuming an illustrative methane-intensity threshold of 0.2% for imports from 2030, around 80 million tonnes of methane emissions could be avoided cumulatively by 2050. The present value of the resulting global climate, health and economic benefits over the modelled period exceeds €700 billion, compared with regulatory costs of around €50 billion. The Regulation could prevent around 155,000 premature deaths worldwide over the modelled period. Delaying implementation by three years while introducing a weaker methane-intensity threshold would result in around €185 billion in foregone societal benefits.
For the analysis, DIW Econ reconstructed the methane emissions associated with European fossil-fuel consumption using international energy trade data and country-specific emission intensities. Different implementation scenarios were then assessed using an extended version of the GIVE integrated assessment model. The model quantifies avoided societal damages from temperature-related mortality, ozone-related respiratory mortality, agricultural losses, heat-related labour productivity losses, additional energy costs and sea-level rise. These benefits were compared with estimates of technical abatement and regulatory compliance costs.
Germany’s federal waterways are of central importance to the national economy. A recent expert report by DIW Econ, commissioned by the Verein für europäische Binnenschifffahrt und Wasserstraßen e.V. (VBW), demonstrates that functioning waterway infrastructure is essential for value creation, employment and security of supply across numerous industrial regions.
How significant is tourism for Berlin’s economy? The updated study, ‘Tourism as an Economic Factor in Berlin – TSA 2023’, provides a comprehensive answer to this question. Using the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA), which is based on international standards set by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation, the study systematically records tourist consumption expenditure and its resulting effects on value added and employment.
Tourism is a key economic factor in Germany. The DIW Econ study ‘Wirtschaftsfaktor Tourismus 2024’ (Tourism as an Economic Factor 2024) analyses the industry’s current economic significance on the basis of a so-called nowcast. This is a statistical extrapolation of selected TSA result variables to the present day (2024). This is because the latest official TSA (Tourism Satellite Account) results from the Federal Statistical Office only go up to 2021 and are still significantly affected by the impact of the pandemic.