How does the US economy compare with the EU economy? Kasper Zeuthen, Senior Media Advisor at the EU Delegation to the United States of America, catches up with the Head of Economic and Financial Affairs, Valerie Rouxel-Laxton, for a check-up on the EU’s economy: 

The US has recovered more qwuickly than EU, yet lately, notably in the 2016 the EU grew a bit faster than the US, so you can't look at one single figure to make this comparison. The two economies have very different structures, strengths, weaknesses, and probably the rebound in the US was due to different types of policy measures that were taken after the financial crisis, but also the economic rebound was faster, simply, due to the structure of the economy and its features.

Also, when we look at the economy more broadly, these economies are strongly intertwined, so when you see recovery in one or the other the other will follow. When EU is doing better, the US is doing better and vice versa and this can happen with a little bit of lag on one or the other side. This usually happens in a quite synchronized way; economic cycles are fairly synchronized around the world. There are similarities in the paths of recovery in both economies...investment in the US has not picked up as fast as one would have expected, and this is due to the nature of the crisis that the global economy has been going through. In that respect, our recoveries have been similar. If you look at similarities between the two economies rather than the differences, there has been some uncertainty lately on both sides due to political factors and that kind of dampens business and consumers' enthusiasm on both sides and we need to do better at preserving the predictability of our business environment...What we have seen...is growth in inequality...

...Global growth to a large extent stems from the rest of the world, the non-EU, non-US space...it's very important to continue encouraging this growth to be open to exchange of goods and services with the other parts of the world, because that is what helps us...The EU and the US should together benefit from evolutions in the global economy, because the source of growth is outside of our mature economies and the only way to reap full benefits of such opportunities that are out there is really to have a very well educated workforce, to be able to retrain people when something happens to a sector or a company in a certain location and to have all these policies in place.

Listen to the full podcast.