Local content requirements is a perfectly fine and respectable way to do industrial policy, but I disagree about using economic rather than engineering indicators to prioritize projects. Absent the fixed exchange rate policy (and that will need to go in any case), I think priority needs to be based on which areas are underserved by the relevant infrastructure, not which areas are underserved in pork barrel.

Now, it so happens that underserved countries will usually be peripheral countries, both because good infrastructure helps you to not be peripheral and because core countries are the ones who have historically been able to have nice things. But I see a danger in letting economic stimulus take priority over engineering. Partly because a major point of the exercise is to make the federal EU bureaucracy think in terms of industrial rather than fiscal policy. And partly because building rail lines to nowhere isn't going to win the EU any friends long-term.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.