The European Commission presented a Communication on "Industrial policy: Reinforcing competitiveness" which it states that the EU industry is in good shape and has the potential to push the European economy back to growth. The Communication looks specifically at the industrial competitiveness performance of the Member States and its conclusions show considerable differences among Member States.

The Commission's Communication on "Industrial policy: Reinforcing competitiveness" which looks specifically at the industrial competitiveness performance of the Member States, shows that EU industry is in good shape and has the potential to push the European economy back to growth. However, there are considerable differences among Member States: the average labour productivity in manufacturing ranges from almost 125% of gross value added per person employed in Ireland to below 20% in Bulgaria. The share of innovating companies varies from 80% in Germany to 25% in Latvia. The business-friendliness of regulation gets highest scores in Finland whereas Italy is in last position. Therefore, the Communication encourages Member States to rapidly implement policies to converge to competitive levels coherent with participation in the euro and the Internal Market.

In addition the Communication indicates that the path to achieve above objective requires robust and coordinated industrial and SMEs policies from the Member States. Moreover, enhancing the global competitiveness of European industry is essential, as 75% of EU exports come from manufacturing firms, who also undertake 80% of industry R&D. To this end, the Commission considers itself ready to promote and monitor structural improvements as the European economy urgently needs to get back to a growth path.

The Communication presented is also accompanied by the "European Competitiveness Report 2011" and the report on "Member States competitiveness performance and policies 2011". Among the results the report shows the EU is leading the way in many instances regarding industry efficiency, generally ahead of the US and closing the gap on Japan. However, there are significant differences in performance across Member States and industrial sectors in the EU. Also it is benefiting from the Single Market, by supporting innovative services and by fully implementing the Single Market rules, in particular the Services Directive. The Commission presented its measures to push this Directive in January 2011. Fully implementing the Services Directive could bring up to €140 billion of EU-wide economic gains, representing a growth potential of 1.5% of GDP.