450 million people in the EU should not just be thought of as a huge market, but also as a source of world-leading new ideas, start-ups and industries. Read more... I studied economics and started my career in the private sector. With Volt Europe, I co-founded a political start-up. ecause I'm generally interested in how technologies work, organisations grow, and strategies are built, I find an incredible number of economic topics interesting in the European Parliament. However, to be effective in their work, MEPs have to pick just a few topics. I have chosen two areas: In the Industry Committee, I am in charge of policy for data and data-based economic processes. In the Budget Committee, I work on a common EU budgetary and fiscal policy, more specifically on the joint investment and reform programs in the COVID-19 crisis and the Ukraine war. For data policy, I have worked in depth on the Data Act, the Data Governance Act and the Digital Europe Programme. These laws address access to and monetization of industrial data across Europe. Simply put, they clarify who can make money from data and how such data markets should be regulated. Importantly, this is about non-personal data, such as those generated in a wind turbine, a power grid, or an aircraft turbine. My team and I have been very vocal in anchoring our "start-up" perspective to these laws. Our priority is to make it easier for small, innovative players to enter a market and to make the European digital economy more competitive. We are actively fighting the recent trend of state-planned industrial policy. Such policies create artificial barriers to competition for new and innovative startups and channel taxpayers' money to large companies that are well connected in political circles. This is bad for consumers, for innovation and thus, for all of us. Funding should be given to those who have the best ideas or concepts, not to those who can pay the most lobbyists in Brussels. For EU fiscal policy, we are working on a common European response to a fundamental problem in Europe. With the euro, most EU countries have a common currency. But there is no jointly coordinated economic policy. This is a problem where the economic structures across EU countries are different, but the monetary policy is the same. The EU Recovery Fund and the subsequent RepowerEU program address this issue. Through them, the EU collectively raised money on the capital market and distributed it to where it was most needed. These funds are linked to strict reform requirements and joint investment priorities. One of the things my team and I did here was to ensure that the methodology for measuring sustainable investments was brought up to the latest scientific standards, thus preventing the "green-washing" of over 250 billion Euros. Right now, I'm also negotiating a reconstruction fund for Ukraine. If you want to know more about my economic policy work, check out my newsletter.