SAM BOWMAN ON Entrepreneurship in Europe

The Telegraph – ICLE Director of Competition Policy Sam Bowman was quoted by The Telegraph in an article about innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe. You can read the full piece (behind a subscribe firewall) here.

Sam Bowman, director of competition policy at the International Centre for Law & Economics, says attitudes to successful businesses in Europe are much more critical than those in the US.

Those attitudes spread into regulations and policy to stymie innovation. “In the US they see massive profits as a reward for success, when in Europe the culture is that you have a lot of social obligations when you have become big. You see that in the approach to taxation and general regulation of large firms,” he says.

“If you are an entrepreneur who can go to one place or another, it is pretty obvious why you would prefer the US approach, which is more conducive to setting up firms and good at importing foreign entrepreneurs.”

…Bowman notes that the US could go in the same direction as it looks at tougher regulations. “The fashionable view in the US is that basically the European approach is correct, and Big Tech is out of control, and we need to adopt a much more precautionary approach to regulation,” he says.

“It is a funny dynamic, given that people in Europe are beginning to ask ‘why the hell have we not got a European Google?'” The continent’s failure stands as a rebuke to Delors’ misguided optimism.

‘In the US they see massive profits as a reward for success. In Europe the culture is that you have a lot of social obligations’ ‘If you are an entrepreneur who can go to one place or another, it is pretty obvious why you would prefer the US approach’