The recent Draghi report says it's an EU problem : here's their Figure 5
but notice it says "productive investment". What is this? A footnote takes us to Hanzl-Weiss, D., & Stehrer, R., ‘Dynamics of productive investmentand gaps between the United States and EU countries’, European Investment Bank Economics Working Paper, 2024/01, 2024.
Figure 3.1 of this shows the oppostite of the above,
namely the US always behind. So what's going on? If you exclude dwellings and other buildings and structures, you get closer to the picture above
here's just excluding dwellings
and here's excluding dwellings and other structures
Hence the focus on "productive" investment. Back to Draghi "This innovation gap also translates into a gap in overall productive investment between the two economies, which is driven mainly by lower investment in tangible ICT assets and in software, databases and intellectual property".
