Abstract
Europe is economically falling behind, and without structural reforms it will be impossible to recover lost ground. Although the scale of Europe’s decline is widely acknowledged, and the importance of savings is frequently emphasised, the long-term savings gap is frequently underestimated. Europe suffers from two major deficits – underdeveloped retirement savings and low stock market capitalisation. While unifying markets is desirable, and financial and insurance regulations should be made more flexible to encourage investment equity, these approaches alone cannot compensate for the significant decline in European long-term capital investments. Only the widespread introduction of defined contribution pension funds in European countries where they are currently lacking will significantly enhance economic financing, improve pension value for money, and help reduce public deficits.
Introduction: Is Europe’s long-term savings deficit limited to €300 billion annually?
Can Europe catch up with the action plans introduced by the European Commission and various national governments that aim to better reallocate savings towards financing productive investments?
The answer remains uncertain. Without structural reforms, recovering lost ground may prove impossible. Although the extent of Europe’s decline is undisputed, and the importance of savings is frequently discussed, there is a real risk that the European response will fall far short of what is needed – primarily due to misjudgement of the true scale of the long-term savings gap. According to Enrico Letta, former prime minister of Italy, €300 billion of European savings are diverted abroad each year, mainly to the US. That is money that could have otherwise supported the development of companies within the European Union. The reason for this diversion of funds, Letta argues, is the fragmentation of Europe’s capital markets and financial system (Letta, 2024). In just a few months, this number – €300 billion – has become central to discussions among central bankers and EU representatives.
Given Europe’s economic challenges, this claim of an annual €300 billion in transfers to the US – echoed by several European leaders – may be significantly underestimated, even anecdotal. For example, the Draghi Report estimates that additional investment needs in the EU will exceed €750 billion per year between 2025 and 2030, including €450 billion for the energy transition and nearly €300 billion annually to close the digital and productivity gaps (Draghi, 2024).[1] The EU’s rearmament requirements are estimated to come to €800 billion over several years (European Commission, 2025b: ). In addition, there are national projects, such as the revival of the French nuclear industry, estimated at €80 billion (Sapy, 2025: 13), and the modernisation of German infrastructure, estimated at €500 billion (Grasland, 2025).
In the EU Compass to Regain Competitiveness and Secure Sustainable Prosperity, the European Commission highlights the importance of finding ways to better finance competitiveness (European Commission, 2025a). It emphasises that ‘the EU lacks an efficient capital market that turns savings into investments’. To address this, it plans to introduce a ‘European Savings and Investments Union to create new savings and investment products, provide incentives for risk capital, and ensure investments flow seamlessly across the EU’. According to the Commission, a financial union could unlock an additional €470 billion in private investment annually (Moller-Nielsen, 2025).
However, this approach is likely to fall short of what is needed, as it underestimates the challenges involved. As this article demonstrates, the actual long-term savings gap is unrelated to the figures commonly cited. Redirecting long-term savings – to repatriate them from the US – or improving the Capital Markets Union are marginal responses that do not address the underlying problem: the lack of savings in European countries without pension funds.
[1] The amount for the energy transition is potentially an underestimate. The additional financing required to achieve carbon neutrality in Europe is estimated at between €410 billion and €620 billion (Villeroy de Galhau, 2024).
Insufficient funding for innovation in Europe
The lack of European leadership in innovative technologies has become a defining characteristic of the continent’s economic and industrial landscape. Europe’s industry appears to be caught in a middle-technology trap, exhibiting a significant divergence from that of the US (Fuest et al., 2024a, 68).
While both continents were still heavily invested in the automotive industry in 2003, their paths have since diverged. The technology sector dominates research and development (R&D) in the US, while Europe continues to rely on the automotive industry. Nearly 25 years later, the automotive sector still accounts for the lion’s share of R&D in Germany, whereas in the US, the automotive and pharmaceutical sectors have been largely supplanted by the industries of the new industrial revolution, namely information and communication technologies (ICTs).
Europe remains focused on traditional sectors, which are undergoing significant technological transformation; however, European industry is failing to take the lead. The continent is struggling to drive innovation in sectors with the highest potential for added value. Europe lags particularly in software development, where US companies account for 75% of the global total, compared with 6% for the EU (Fuest et al., 2024b).
The report by the former president of the European Central Bank (ECB) on the future of competitiveness in Europe (Draghi, 2024) comes to the same conclusion when it highlights the lack of growth in Europe compared with the US over the past 20 years. Growth is linked to production, which in turn depends on the total workforce and the number of hours worked. On both counts, Europe is lagging, with lower population growth and fewer hours worked. What is striking is the productivity gap between Europe and the US since 2000. As historian and economic expert Adam Tooze explains, ‘[w]hen we seek to explain labour productivity, one obvious place to look is investment. Workers equipped with more capital tend to be more productive’ (Tooze, 2024).
At the macroeconomic level, investment is not at the scale needed to meet the challenges of productivity and growth. This seems to be largely due to lower corporate R&D investment in Europe, which, according to the OECD, stands at just 1.2% of GDP, compared with 2.4% in the US (OECD, 2025b). And yet, in 2002, Europe set itself the target of achieving a level of investment equivalent to 3% of GDP, a threshold it has never managed to reach.[1]
Many explanations have been given for this lack investment at the EU level, which is particularly visible in Europe’s ‘failure to capitalise on the first digital revolution led by the internet – both in terms of generating new tech companies and diffusing digital tech into the economy’ (Draghi, 2024).
According to many analysts, business creation and development in Europe are hampered by market fragmentation, venture capital constraints, and insufficient support for innovation. It is the Commission’s view that ‘European start-ups have a hard time expanding within the Single Market because of persisting regulatory barriers’ (Commission européenne, 2025). It also points out that they have less access to venture capital and other forms of capital than their US counterparts: the share of global venture capital funds raised in the EU is just 5%, compared with 52% in the US and 4% in China in 2023, according to the European Investment Bank (Fratto et al., 2024).
For the Commission, these two factors are mutually reinforcing: the lower growth prospects of European start-ups and the complexity of the applicable rules make them less attractive to investors. As a result, many of them seek financing in the US and set up there to benefit from a larger market and customer base.
[1] ‘In March 2002 the Barcelona European Council analyzed the Lisbon Strategy and its implementation, and set the target to increase the average research investment level from 1.9% of GDP today to 3% of GDP by 2010, of which 2/3 should be funded by the private sector’ (European Commission, 2002).
Europe’s shortfall in long-term capital for global competitiveness
The success of Great Britain, France, and Germany in the first industrial revolution is historically linked to the existence of a significant stock of savings, which were drained for the benefit of infrastructure (canals, railroads, etc.) and industry. This draining was initially carried out by notaries, at the heart of the capital market, before the development of banks, stock exchanges, and then the rise of savings from the middle or even working classes (in the form of savings banks, retirement savings from friendly societies, or mutual aid societies). The abundance of savings enabled and amplified the growth of the years 1890–1914, marked by the rise of the chemical, electrical, automotive industries, and then the aeronautics industry.
The Second World War marked a rupture between the US and Europe. In the US, corporate financing was originally quite similar to that in Europe, with a predominance of debt and non-voting shares after the Civil War. As in Europe, this configuration protected lenders from the risks associated with asymmetric information and it avoided the dilution of shareholder capital, as these financial instruments are not associated with voting rights. But the Second World War brought a change of scale with the emergence of venture capital.
The emergence of venture capital made it possible to invest in risky businesses without the massive reliance on credit that was dominant at the time, as listed equity markets were suited to companies with a certain maturity. Venture capital funds invested in unlisted securities, enabling the development of a multitude of companies in technological sectors (Parpaleix, 2019).
In the second half of the twentieth century, advances in risk quantification and management provided a client base for the rapidly expanding mutual funds. Regulatory changes – notably the lifting of restrictions preventing pension funds from investing in venture capital – broadened this clientele and made it possible to increase the number of unlisted investments. The creation of the Nasdaq in 1971 encouraged the growth of tech companies by giving them access to the listed stock market. Initially seen as an antechamber to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) for companies too small to be listed, Nasdaq established itself as a lasting alternative, with a significant number of companies never leaving.
This model – featuring a comprehensive ecosystem for financing innovation, from venture capital to the stock market, supported by long-term investors such as pension funds at every stage of development – is largely absent in Europe. Many European countries, devastated by the two world wars, failed to rebuild their pension capital, which had been eroded by inflation or confiscated during wartime. To this day, they rely almost exclusively on pay-as-you-go pension systems.
In the post-war years, characterised by state-led reconstruction efforts such as the Marshall Plan, rebuilding retirement savings was not a priority. In Italy, France, and Germany, small and medium-sized enterprises and mid-cap companies managed to recover by funding their incremental growth through self-financing, bank loans, or investments from insurers. However, these traditional financing methods are ill-suited to supporting disruptive innovation – particularly as the lending capacity of banks and the investment capacity of insurers have been significantly constrained by prudential regulations (e.g., Basel I and Solvency II), thereby reinforcing the critical role of pension funds.
This contributes to delays in innovative sectors, increased European dependence on technologies developed in the US and in Asia, and thus even a loss of sovereignty. The remarkable dynamism of US digital and tech companies stands in stark contrast to the struggles of their European counterparts (Figure 1). For every young tech leader in Europe, there are 17 in the US (McAfee, 2024b). At the end of 2023, the US had 241 listed companies under the age of 50 with a market capitalisation of $10 billion or more. The combined market value of these companies was $29,566 billion.
At the same time, the EU had 14 listed companies aged under 50 (17 times less than the US) with a market capitalisation of $10 billion or more, for a combined market value of $434 billion (68 times less than the US). Of these 14 companies, three – Spotify, BioNTech, and Icon – representing a third of European capitalisation ($139 billion), were listed in the US. This disparity is partly due to the abundance of retirement savings in the US – largely invested in equities – which helps fuel innovation through markets such as the Nasdaq (Figure 2).
In a world where equity capital drives disruptive innovations, the low market capitalisation of European companies means they are falling behind in the race to innovate – and, as a result, they are losing out economically.
Figure 1. Public from-scratch US and EU companies less than 50 years old, with a market capitalisation of $10 billion or more
Source: McAfee (2024a). Bubble area proportional to market capitalisation. Companies are grouped by head office at time of initial public offering. Market capitalisation in 2023 USD, valued on 26 November 2024. The green bubble indicates a company in a ‘technology’ sector. Blue bubbles indicate all other industries.
Figure 2. The US leads in retirement savings and market capitalisation (2023)
Source: Marques and Philippe (2025), based on World Bank (2025), OECD (2024), and World Federation of Exchanges (2025).
Europe’s market capitalisation shortfall: €19.3 trillion.
Europe lags by €19.3 trillion in stock market capitalisation according to our calculation when comparing the weight of stock markets and setting aside the likely overvaluation of US assets (Sharma, 2025). European market capitalisation has grown more slowly over the past ten years. The EU has been overtaken by the US and is also losing ground compared with equity markets in the rest of the world – crucial instruments for financing innovation.
It suffers from atrophied long-term equity investment, which penalises the development of corporate equity. This is a problem for all companies, from start-ups to major international groups forced to diversify their stock markets. The Institut économique Molinari has calculated a market capitalisation shortfall of €19.3 trillion between the EU and the US by the end of 2023. The capitalisation of EU companies represented 65% of GDP, compared with 177% of GDP in the US, a gap equivalent to 112% of European GDP (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Europe lags behind in market capitalisation
(as a percentage of GDP, 1975–2023)
Source: Institut économique Molinari calculations based on World Bank (2025), Federation of European Securities Exchanges (2025), World Federation of Exchanges (2025).
The EU is also outpaced by China in the equity markets that are key to financing innovation (Table 1). This contributes to cumulative delays in a number of innovative fields and increases Europe’s dependency on technological innovation from the rest of the world.
According to the Digital Dependency Index (DDI), Germany, France, the UK, and Italy, for example, are highly vulnerable to China in respect of ICTs (between 0.86 and 0.95, where 1 is total dependence and 0 is complete autonomy). In terms of infrastructure and platforms, these countries are highly dependent on the US (0.98). For the authors of this index, ‘European countries are falling behind in every dimension compared to China, South Korea, and the US. In the last decade, Europe’s digital autonomy has eroded as digital interactions have become more asymmetric with China (ICT trade dependence), with the US (infrastructure and platform dependence), and the East Asian region (Intellectual property dependence)’ (Mayer & Lu, 2023: 1).
If Europe wants to create leaders in technological fields and be able to finance innovation to avoid becoming a ‘digital colony’ of the US and China, these financial issues need to be addressed head-on. At the end of 2024, the total market capitalisation of EU stock exchanges stood at €9.7 trillion – roughly one-sixth the size of US stock exchanges, which reached €62.2 trillion for the NYSE and Nasdaq combined (Table 1). The EU’s largest stock exchange, Euronext, was just one-fifth the size of the NYSE (traditional US stocks).
Table 1. The EU outpaced by the US and China (end of 2024)
Top 15 stock markets accounting for 90% of global equity capitalisation
Source: Institut économique Molinari calculations based on World Federation of Exchanges (2025).
This is not a matter of skill – either on the part of European companies or stock exchanges – as the necessary tools and expertise are in place. Rather, it reflects the scarcity of long-term savings in Europe, stemming from the limited emphasis on capitalisation-based pension systems in many continental countries.
Europe faces a €19.7 trillion retirement funding gap
Europe faces a €19.7 trillion retirement funding gap according to our calculations. Except for Scandinavia and the Netherlands, the EU is an economic area where pension capital remains underdeveloped.[1] In much of the world, a significant share of pension benefits is financed through collective or individual capitalisation, with the capital being partly invested in the local economy. The EU, however, benefits far less from this source of funding.
The major European countries – Germany, France, Italy, and Spain – have low levels of retirement savings, amounting to just 7–12% of their GDPs. In contrast, the UK, Switzerland, and Iceland – none of whom are part of the EU – have retirement savings ranging from 79–182% of their GDPs. Within the EU, only Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark exceed the OECD average, with retirement savings representing between 107% and 198% of their GDPs at the end of 2023 (Figure 4).
[1] According to Thomas Piketty (http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ideology/pdf/F10.10.pdf), the period 1914–1950, covering the First and Second World Wars, was associated with inflation rates of 13% and 17% per annum in France and Germany, leading to a depreciation of pension capitalisations in both countries. This factor was not found in the US and Great Britain, where inflation rates were close to 3% over the period.
Figure 4. Retirement savings as % of GDP (2023)
Source: Institut économique Molinari calculations based on OECD (2024).
In Europe, retirement savings accounted for 28% of GDP, versus an average of 143% in the US – a gap of nearly 115% of GDP (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Europe lags in terms of retirement savings (% of GDP, 2001–2023)
Source: Institut économique Molinari calculations based on OECD (2024) with a weighted average of assets invested.
This funding gap represents a real handicap for the financing of European companies. Pension plans are long-term investors. They have the distinctive feature of managing their depositors’ savings over long horizons, corresponding to capitalisation cycles of around 40 years during working life, followed by an annuity payout over 20 years on retirement. These savings are heavily allocated to equities, which offer an attractive risk–return profile over long horizons, and they often favour domestic markets, with an average of 56% of assets invested locally.
The relationship between the growth of retirement savings and market capitalisation is direct and robust (Figure 6), even though a significant share of retirement savings is also invested in fixed-income instruments or abroad.
Figure 6. Growth in retirement savings and stock market capitalisation go hand in hand (% of GDP at the end of 2022)
Source: Institut économique Molinari calculations based on World Bank (2025), CEIC (2025), Federation of European Securities Exchanges (2025) and OECD (2024). R2 = 0.52.
The myth of insurance savings offsetting the shortfall in retirement savings
Some analysts believe that the lack of retirement savings could be compensated for by reallocating a portion of household assets, notably life insurance, which is particularly well developed in several European countries. The reality is far more complex, for reasons related to the weight of non-financial assets and the financial savings behaviour of households.
On the one hand, the data shows that the wealth of European households is primarily made up of non-financial assets. According to the latest edition of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (European Central Bank, 2023), 80% of the wealth of eurozone households is made up of non-financial assets, including 65% real estate, 47% of which consists of primary residences (Table 2). As such, a significant proportion of the household savings rate is made up of property loan repayments (Babeau, 2016), and France is probably no exception. These repayments are a constraint on borrowers’ savings and limit their scope for investment in financial assets, since the flow of savings is monopolised by loan repayments over a long period of the life cycle (Masson & Touzé, 2019).
On the other hand, a significant proportion of household financial assets are ‘liquid’. Precautionary savings play a predominant role among financial assets. Current or savings accounts accounted for an average of 45% of financial assets in the eurozone, or 9% of total household assets in 2021. Contrary to popular belief, the high proportion of liquid savings is not unique to France (8%) but is comparable or even higher in a number of European countries, notably Germany (10%) and Belgium (11%).
Finally, life insurance, which is significantly developed in some countries, notably France, does not compensate for the weakness of retirement savings, for both quantitative and qualitative reasons.
Table 2. Breakdown of household wealth (2021, in %)
Source: Institut économique Molinari calculations based on Household Finance and Consumption Survey, data excluding compulsory pension schemes and including only voluntary pension savings (European Central Bank, 2023).
Eurostat data on European countries shows that life insurance does not offset the weakness of pension funds. For instance, despite its significant weight, French life insurance (61% of GDP in euros at the end of 2023 for individual products) does not offset the shortfall in pension funds. Life insurance and retirement savings represent 73% of GDP in France, compared with 117% of GDP in the US, giving a French savings deficit of 44% of GDP or €1.25 trillion in 2023. This figure is underestimated, as the household account approach does not take into account all retirement savings.
OECD data on household wealth confirms that life insurance does not compensate for the underdevelopment of pension funds in Europe compared with the US (Figure 8). Life insurance and pension savings accounted for an average 57% of GDP in the EU in 2023, compared with 117% of GDP in the US according to household accounts, representing a European deficit of 60% of GDP or €10.4trillion euros.
Most importantly, life insurance is no substitute for pension funds when it comes to financing the economy by investing in listed or unlisted equities. Indeed, insurers’ investments are limited for reasons linked to the investment horizon, an aspect reinforced by prudential regulations.
The European insurers invest less in equities and physical assets (real estate, infrastructure, etc.) than do pension funds (Association française des investisseurs institutionnels, 2023). On average, insurers are twice as heavily invested in debt products (bonds, loans) or cash than pension fund managers are (Table 3). The main exceptions are in the northern countries, notably Sweden, where pension fund logic dominates (Abadie, 2019). In France, we find this defensive bias with only 8% of French life insurers’ portfolios invested in equities in 2022, compared with 26% of pension or provident portfolios, that is, a ratio of one to three (Figure 7).
Figure 7. Household financial wealth (2023, as % of GDP)
Source: Marques and Philippe (2025), calculations based on Eurostat (2025).
This bias against equity investments is linked to the characteristics of insurance contracts, some of which can be terminated at any time. This hazard forces insurers to opt for a shorter management time horizon than pension fund managers do. The latter are able to anticipate retirement and annuitisation dates with precision. They have visibility over very long time horizons and average investment horizons (maturity) of 20–30 years, which is not the case for insurers, who can face outflows at any time. As a result, life insurance does not place as much emphasis on long-term assets as pension funds do, even though, in practice, savers sometimes allow their capital to grow over a very long period.
This bias is reinforced by EU regulatory constraints, notably Solvency II. This directive aims to limit risks, with an approach that makes holding equities on insurers’ balance sheets particularly costly. It does not take full account of the specificities of long-term savings, which in practice reduce the risks associated with holding equities, a less risky asset over the long term (Hamayon, 2013).
For the same maturity, it encourages insurers to divest from equities. In 2021, investments in listed and unlisted equities or in equity funds and/or private equity represented 7% of insurers’ investments in the EU (De Groen & Oliinyk, 2022). According to some models, the Solvency II directive generated constraints, leading to a halving of insurers’ equity allocation (Pénasse & Dezorme, 2021). This low investment in equities and long-term assets is penalising the financing of the economy, even if various adjustments have already been made (Leboucher, 2024).
Figure 8. Pension and life insurance and annuity entitlements (2023, % of GDP)
Sources: Calculations by Institut économique Molinari based on households and non-profit institutions serving households (OECD, 2025a) and Eurostat (2025) for the EU average.
Table 3. Insurers invest more short-term assets than pension funds do (2022 as % of assets under management)
Source: Institut économique Molinari calculations based on Af2i (Association française des investisseurs institutionnels, 2023), bonds, share of debt (bonds and loans), and liquid assets in the portfolios of insurers and pension funds.
Conclusions: Generalising pension funds is essential for the economy
For all these reasons, the notion that Europe already possesses a large stock of savings and simply needs to reallocate it is an illusion. Europe faces significant twin deficits – stemming from the underdevelopment of retirement savings and stock market capitalisations – amounting to €19,7 trillion and €19,3 trillion, respectively, in 2023.
While unifying markets and making financial and insurance regulations more flexible to encourage investment are desirable steps, they are insufficient to compensate for how far Europe has fallen behind in terms of long-term capital. Only the widespread introduction of pension funds in all European countries where they are currently absent will significantly improve economic financing, improve pension value for money, and help reduce public deficits.
France and the European Commission aim to reallocate existing savings, but this is insufficient to bridge the gap between Europe and the US. A significant share of household wealth is held in property or very short-term investments. Even life insurance does not compensate for the absence of pension funds in Europe, as it remains accessible at any time and therefore cannot be invested in equities to the same extent as long-term retirement savings.
For Europe to catch up, the most effective solution would be the widespread adoption of pension funds – both in the private sector and to finance civil servant pensions in the public sector. Accordingly, the Compass for the EU would benefit from being supplemented by two measures: firstly, the creation of sovereign funds to provide for government employee pensions in countries where these are managed separately from private-sector schemes (Marques, 2025: 11–12); and secondly, an increase in the share of funded pensions in the private sector (Marques, 2023). These two measures would reduce the cost of providing public services and social protection, thereby improving price competitiveness while increasing the amount of capital available to support the economic fabric and finance long-term innovation.
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