When Mario Draghi presented his competitiveness report to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on 17 September 2024, he put a price on the task. "EUR 750-800 billion in additional investment will be required each year… The effort would be more than double that of Marshall Plan," he said.
Two years on, the bond market is showing how hard that money is to raise.
This week France's 10-year borrowing cost climbed to roughly 4.93%, up more than a percentage point since June. The premium over German debt is closing on 1.5 percentage points. Euro-zone inflation is at a three-year high and the European Central Bank is expected to raise rates again.
That is the financing environment Draghi's numbers now have to work in. A programme of this size depends on deep, integrated capital markets that can channel European savings into European companies. Europe's are neither deep nor integrated.
EPIC's Draghi Implementation Index, published at draghiwatch.eu, tracks how many of the report's 383 recommendations have become binding EU law. Its preliminary update of July 2026 counted 60 as fully implemented, or 15.7%. Counting partial progress, the figure was 158, or 41.3%. The January 2026 interim audit had 58 fully implemented (15.1%) and 149 with partial progress included (38.9%).
The pace has dropped. The half-year from September 2025 to January 2026 added 7.5 percentage points on the strict-plus-partial measure. The half-year from February to June 2026 added 2.4.
EPIC also describes a pattern. Delivery is fastest where competitiveness overlaps with security. In the Index, defence moved from 35.7% to 78.6% between the September 2025 baseline and the January 2026 audit. It is slowest on structural reforms that force market outcomes. Capital markets integration sits among the weakest areas on delivery, a finding EPIC repeats in its July 2026 report on the cost of Single Market fragmentation.
That report adds a warning that applies directly to financing. Legal integration is not market integration. It cites research by Herz and Varela-Irimia (2020) showing that local firms are more than 900 times more likely to win public procurement contracts than foreign bidders, in a market that has been legally open for decades. Capital markets have the same split between what the rulebook says and what the market does.
Draghi's own words from the same Strasbourg address point to the stakes. "If one objects to building a true Single Market, to capital market integration, and objects to debt issuance, one objects to our EU objectives," he told MEPs.
Draghi's investment gap was never only a spending question. It is a financing question, and the financing depends on reforms the EU has been slowest to deliver. A sell-off in the euro zone's second-largest bond market makes each euro of public borrowing dearer, which pushes the investment burden back onto private capital. That is the capital the stalled reforms were meant to unlock. The Index suggests Europe is meeting a harder funding market with the old, fragmented plumbing.
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