Unlike the US, countries in the EU do not appear to be able to compete by offering favorable conditions to corporations and this especially concerns taxes.
which is a big design fault that hampers the EU especially as nations facing debt problems will use it to shore their finances up which keeps up and coming countries from doing that, being up and coming.
Unfortunately this is not true anymore. With the raise of US/UK style neoliberalism various states like Luxembourg, Slovakia, Lichtenstein, Germany, Austria, Ireland ... try to outcompete each other in offering less taxes, less union influence, less labor costs for more jobs and companies regularly blackmail the EU states for more favorable conditions.
E.g. Germany can only hold its current EU stronghold by outcompeting France with much lower labor costs.
which is a big design fault that hampers the EU especially as nations facing debt problems will use it to shore their finances up which keeps up and coming countries from doing that, being up and coming.