Negative thinking not good for China-EU ties

Four months ago, when the property management company announced that the rooftop of my apartment building in Brussels would undergo renovation for the next 10 months, excluding rainy days, I wondered why it would take so long, because in China it would just take a few weeks to complete the job.

It turned out that only a few workers showed up twice a week, and none came to work even on quite a few sunny days.

That to me is like a microcosm example of why the European Union has become less competitive today compared with the United States or China — as detailed in the EU competitiveness report by Mario Draghi, former Italian prime minister and European Central Bank president.