Unlocking eSignature Legitimateness for Corporations in the European Union

How to eSign a document: eSignature legitimateness for corporations in European Union

Look at this list of the largest tech companies in the world out of the top 20, 11 are American nine are Chinese, and none of them are European. The European Union is the world's second largest economy and has been the home and the starting point of the first and second industrial revolution. Seeing the development of mass manufacturing and the railroad, it has failed to reap the benefits of the third industrial revolution centered around digitalization, unlike the United States and China, which have managed to create giant tech conglomerates, the likes of the GAFA in the United States, and China's BATX. Over the past 20 years, Europe has no large trillion dollar company to pioneer innovation. If you look at this other list of most innovative companies, European firms are far from the top. And none of the top European firms are on the cutting edge sectors that are driving the fourth industrial revolution, the one centered around the use of data. There are fears that Europe may be falling behind in innovation. The networks built by large American Chinese, Japanese, and even Korean companies mean that they have the money to invest in the latest technologies and thriving startup ecosystems there have meant that they have been able to make the best use of innovations. So why doesn't the European Union have a startup ecosystem or large companies to match the United States and China's innovation. One of the problems facing the European union's companies is their playing field. American and Chinese firms enjoy relatively homogenous markets where people speak the same language, share the same culture and follow the same rules. In comparison Europe's market is fragmented by the different languages of its member States and regulation. The EU countries treat twice as much as they would without the European union, but half as much as the different States of the United States. While the European single market aims on paper to reduce the barriers between the different member States, it focuses on goods. This is despite the European service industry representing four-fifths of the European union's economy as a result of de-industrialization over the past decades. Previous attempts at harmonizing the rules, like with the 2006 European directive on services and the single market was filled with holes. The document contains the word excluded 17 times exempting financial services, healthcare, transportation services, electronic communication, and Audio visual services, just to name a few. While on paper, there was a single market, in reality, it is still divided along national lines. This prevents startups from reaching scale as easily as their American or Chinese counterparts who have a unified home markets. The fragmentation of the European markets means there's little awareness for what happens in other European countries. Early funding in European countries represents only one seventh of what it is in the United States and half of what it is in South Korea. As a result, the European union is only home to about 12% of the world's unicorns, startups that are valued above 1 billion euros with most being founded, the United States and China. The European union's R & D budget lags behind the U S is China's Japan's. And Korea's though, this is in part because of the fact that Eastern and Southern Europe are lagging behind. While Europe has a series of tech hubs located mostly in Western and Northern Europe, there were low in the rankings that are American Japanese, Korean, and Chinese counterparts will in 2000 that you recommended countries to spend 3% of their GDP on research and development. Most EU countries are far behind that. For the most successful and promising European companies, it is sometimes easier to be just bought by another company or to relocate mostly to the United States where money is easier to raise and the market bigger to start off. The European union also fosters a different sort of capitalism than in the US or China while the US deregulated its economy under the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the 1980s, and trying to follow as a form of state capitalism, the European union follows more of a state guided model. While there are significant variations between countries that you has a more regulated economy, which follows government policy, the United States in large part follows the free market and China's companies are for the most part state owned or state supported. This free market approach and state capitalism needs to large amounts of capital being funneled to companies in the early phases of their development. The European union has also been far more opposed the creation of industry champions than the U S which for the most part, just lets them exist, and China, which creates national champions based off of its national priorities. Large tech companies, regardless of how bad they are for competition are responsible for a lot of innovation. The top 10, most innovative companies are responsible for nearly 24% of all patents applications. The European commission whose goal is to ensure market competition has regularly stopped European companies from merging together, leaving the continent with the fear that it's small nation size companies would not be able to compete with Chinese or American giants. In 2019, it blocked the merger between French Alstom and German Siemens from creating a European train champion. Sitting competition concerns. To be clear, it's fine to be big. That's not the issue here. But we found that competition from other suppliers would have been insufficient to replace the considerable loss of competition due to the merger. The logic goes that if the you stops preventing mergers to increase its international competitiveness will undermine its local competitiveness. Nonetheless, the economy ministers of France, Germany, Italy, and Poland send the letter to the European competition commissioner. Margaret Vestager who blocked the merger asking for more flexibility in tying up companies. But despite these problems, the European union seems to be making progress towards fixing its single markets and improving access to funding for startups. In 2017, it unveiled the e-services card to move friction between its companies. Instead of having a point of contact in every country to get approval, they can get approval in their home country and through an EU platform automate approval and their target country. The Gaia X initiative aims to unite Europe's digital forces to allow them to compete with the American and Chinese digital providers. Since 2015, the European Union has been working on the capital markets union, to make sure that funding and investment can flow easily between the different countries and create a single market for investments. Fewer companies are now moving to the United States and are doing so later as the European startup ecosystem matures, providing better access to mentoring capital and talent for young companies. Pro-business governments in Europe are cutting through the red tape with European leaders coming up with catchy names for their startup focus, Francis Emmanuel Macron focused on labeling France a start-up because the challenges we face are global. We need to think global. We want the pioneers, the innovators, the entrepreneurs of the whole word to come to Florence. And Spain sped with Sanchez launched the Spain entrepreneurial nation plan. These national initiatives are being followed by an EU wide plan to make startups more competitive and reinforce the European startup ecosystem. The European Union'scourt of justice raised the bar for preventing mergers by requiring the European Commission to come up with stronger arguments, proving that a merged company could be too dominant, but they spent all these efforts. The underlying difference between the countries of the European Union mean that companies have substantial additional costs to access their own home markets. The European union needs to go a step further to remove all the barriers that can to solidify the European markets. But that will come at further cost to sovereignty. And while the European single market is deepening fully integrating, it will be nearly impossible. The European Union is United in diversity, but that it comes along with limits to integration. This was Into Europe. Thanks for watching. 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