On November 7, 2024, Dr. Andrei Radulescu, a senior researcher at the Institute for World Economy of the Romanian Academy of Sciences and a member of the Bretton Woods Committee, delivered a lecture to Business Administration students (English Program) as part of the International Economics course led by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Stella Raleva from the Department of Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.

The lecture, titled “Economic Challenges for Europe in the Context of the Global Tensions” addressed key characteristics of the current global economy, including great transformations, geopolitical fragmentation, and the arms race. Dr. Radulescu highlighted significant global development challenges such as low financing climate change, overvaluation of stock markets, rising financing costs, and increased volatility. Against this backdrop, he outlined the primary challenges facing the EU economy, including excessive indebtedness impacting future generations, declining international competitiveness, structural crises in industry, low potential GDP growth, insufficient pace in implementing the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Plan, and risks of economic divergence within the Union.

Dr. Radulescu also presented his vision for transforming the EU, a proposal published by the Bretton Woods Committee and already shared in several EU countries. His vision includes specific recommendations for accelerating labor productivity, increasing R&D spending, raising the digital economy's GDP share, expanding the number of new listed companies and new investors on the EU capital markets, reducing CO2 emissions, and lowering the regulatory burden on businesses. He also emphasized intensifying efforts toward a circular economy, improving stakeholder communication, and addressing disparities among EU member states in market competition, regulation, taxation, workforce skills, and education, labour force participation rates, and R&D investment.