When Mario Draghi handed the EU his report on competitiveness in September 2024, he gave it 383 recommendations and a blunt warning: act on them, or watch Europe slide into managed decline. Nearly two years on, the natural question is how much has actually been done — and by whom. EPIC, a Brussels policy institute, has been tracking exactly that through its Draghi Implementation Index, which counts how many of the 383 recommendations have become binding EU law. Its July 2026 update adds something new: a ranking of the European Commission's own directorates-general, scoring each department on how much of the agenda in its remit it has delivered.
The results are lopsided. DG Trade tops the table, with 41.7% of its relevant recommendations strictly implemented. At the bottom sit DG Energy at 2.7% and DG Employment at zero. The spread is the story: on paper every department works from the same playbook, but delivery depends heavily on which corner of the agenda a recommendation falls into.
Across the whole agenda, the index's July 2026 reading puts strict implementation at 15.7% — 60 of the 383 recommendations fully written into law — and 41.3%, or 158 recommendations, at least partially implemented. That is progress from the 15.1% strict and 38.9% partial the index recorded in its January 2026 audit. But the momentum has faded. The February-to-June half-year added just 2.4 percentage points to the partial score, against 7.5 points in the previous six months. The engine is still running; it is losing speed.
Look at where the movement happens and a pattern emerges. The areas that surged are the ones where economic competitiveness overlaps with hard security. In the January reading, defence had jumped from 35.7% to 78.6% in a single half-year. The July update logs the €90 billion Ukraine defence loan and the Russian gas phase-out among the measures crossing the line. Trade, the top-ranked department, is likewise where industrial strategy meets geopolitics.
The laggards are the structural reforms — the ones that would prise open protected markets and rewire how capital moves around the bloc. Energy, where Draghi warned that EU firms pay electricity prices “2-3 times higher than those in the United States and in China,” was the weakest of the movers at 22.9% in January. Single-market and capital-market integration, the reforms Draghi called non-negotiable, sit among the weakest on delivery. These are the changes that create losers as well as winners at home, and they move at the pace of domestic politics.
A department-by-department scoreboard is more than a curiosity. It turns a sprawling 383-point agenda into a set of named accountabilities, and it exposes an uncomfortable truth: Europe delivers fastest when a reform can be badged as security, and drags its feet on the slow, structural work the Draghi Report argued matters most for long-term growth. Draghi put the annual price of closing the gap at €750-800 billion in extra investment — “more than double that of the Marshall Plan.” EPIC's own conclusion is that the bloc needs a single delivery vehicle, a “European Competitiveness Act” modelled on the Fit-for-55 climate package, to force the pace on the reforms that keep slipping. The scoreboard's value is that it makes the slippage impossible to hide. The next full review lands in September 2026; on the current trajectory, the structural half of Draghi's agenda will still be waiting.
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