These articles also gloss over the US market is 400m English speakers with one set of legislation, more or less. Europe is 20+ languages and 20+ sets of legislation. That’s a colossal advantage. And any clicks and mortar business gets the benefit of absurdly cheap shipping costs compared to Europe.
There are counterexamples in Asia though like South Korea, Taiwan etc. that have massively outperformed Europe over recent decades despite not having those advantages.
Having said that, not sure the SK model is something to emulate given the social problems it seems to have caused
That’s an important point, people always compare growth as if growing from the bottom is as hard as growing from (close to) the top. People love to do this with India and china.
That's true - the counter-counterexample is Singapore where GDP/capita shot straight past western European countries and just kept going. They do have the significant advantage of being English speaking though
Singapore also has the advantage of being a significant financial hub. But that only works when being small, it doesn’t scale to something like the EU.
Business law is a state issue in the U.S. The reason that the U.S. has one set of legislation (more or less) is that 50 states (well, 49) have voluntarily adopted the Uniform Commercial Code. There is absolutely nothing stopping Europe from doing the same or similar except lack of political will.
Louisiana. I guess it's difficult to reconcile parts of it with the Code Napoleon. All other states have English common law as the basis of their legal systems.
Turns out political will is a hell of a lot easier in a single country like the US, than 27 like the EU. Especially when the US has fucntionally one language, and the EU has who-knows how many.
