The Netherlands Seeks a Bigger Stage for Its Innovative Companies

IMF News, September 23, 2026

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The Netherlands has built one of Europe’s strongest high technology ecosystems, and is home to leading companies in semiconductors, photonics, digital technologies, life sciences and other advanced industries.
The sector accounts for about 11 percent of value added and 6 percent of employment, an expansion of about 2 and 1 percentage points, respectively, over the past decade.
Dutch exports contribute more value added to other countries’ exports than the European average.

Converting innovative startups into global leaders remains constrained by limited scale, domestic bottlenecks, and rising global fragmentation.
While The Netherlands excels at generating ideas and early-stage companies, scaling them depends on access to larger, integrated markets, conditions that remain incomplete within the European Union (EU), especially in heavily regulated industries like biotech, defense, and digital services.
Fragmented regulatory regimes raise compliance costs and limit cross-border expansion.
Domestic bottlenecks include:
- labor and skill shortages,
- electricity grid congestion that keeps energy costs elevated,
- limited access to risk capital for later-stage companies facing larger capital requirements over a longer period before they become profitable.

Integration into global value chains drives Dutch competitiveness but also creates vulnerabilities in a more fragmented global economy.
High-tech exports depend heavily on imported inputs, and a growing share of those are coming from outside the EU.
Exports are concentrated in a few markets, especially Germany, the United States, and China.
This two-sided exposure—upstream through dependence on imports, and downstream through concentrated export markets—is increasingly becoming a source of uncertainty and vulnerability as geoeconomic tensions rise.
Trade restrictions, export controls, and subsidy races may disrupt both supply chains and market access.

Execute faster:
- Implement plans to ease long-standing bottlenecks—particularly skill shortages, electricity-grid, and nitrogen-related permitting constraints.
- Ensure steadfast implementation and address financing gaps that hinder scaling of innovative companies.
- Enhance coordination across government levels.
- Learn from successful initiatives, such as Project Beethoven, to support the semiconductor industry, for strengthening policy execution.
Scale in Europe:
- Match better domestic execution with leveraging EU-level policies to create stronger conditions for high-tech companies to scale.
- Combine supply-side support, including public funding, with deeper integration of the EU Single Market to increase market depth, lower barriers to cross-border value chains, and boost cross-border demand.
Build resilience:
- Emphasize research and development diffusion, supply-chain diversification, and the energy transition at both national and EU levels.
- Identify and manage critical dependencies while leveraging strategic interdependencies.
- Address slow grid expansion, high energy costs, and fragmented EU energy markets through stronger coordination to enhance energy resilience.

The task for the Netherlands is to make its openness work better by:
- removing domestic bottlenecks;
- using Europe to provide the scale and market that companies need; and
- managing dependencies before they become vulnerabilities.
If successful, innovative Dutch companies will be able to continue to benefit from openness and global integration, scale faster, and generate stronger innovation, knowledge and productivity spillovers across the country and beyond.

Fabian Bornhorst and Nina Budina, IMF News, September 23, 2026.