Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-25-Speech-3-060"
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"en.20040225.5.3-060"2
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"Mr President, the torrent of words, not to say hot air, about the main guidelines can no longer obscure the fact that the Lisbon process has stalled and that the European Union has no economic policy. This, in fact, has been a recurring problem since the birth of economic and monetary union, in spite of all the proposals that have been made.
There is, of course, an issue of governance. Mr Blair, Mr Chirac and Mr Schroeder are proposing a super-minister. And why not? But what use is a minister if nobody knows how to solve the underlying problem? What is more interesting is the observation in Mrs Randzio-Plath’s report to the effect that governance suffers from a democratic deficit. She calls for debates in each country, in each national parliament, debates to which the whole of society should be able to contribute, before the springtime meeting of the Council. I may tell you, however, that such a proposal was carried by this Parliament back in 1996, following my report on public participation in the Union’s institutional system, but it was never implemented, and this Parliament has not pursued the matter.
In essence, structural reform is something of a magic formula. Reforms are indispensable, but clearly the real issues are their direction and substance and the need to avoid contradictions. If we take the case of the labour market, positive mobility is essential, yet at the same time the Member States are taking decisions designed to prevent workers from the new Member States from exercising freedom of movement within the European labour market. The European Union must therefore create a wider range of incentives, particularly for the much-vaunted development of human capital, an effort that will undoubtedly require a high volume of resources which we are not mobilising at the present time.
People speak of industrial policy, but that has not been functioning properly since the time of the Maastricht Treaty. As far as funding goes, it has been established that investments of general interest will not be made without an increase in Community resources. And I must emphasise that the authors of the Lisbon objectives also proposed that public funds devoted to priority projects be exempted from the discipline of the Stability Pact. But that is not all. Everyone knows that there are large sums of money flowing into portfolio investments and restructuring but not into industrial investment. One fundamental problem is therefore that credit facilities, the tax system and savings rules provide insufficient incentive for industrial investment. At a time when the falling dollar is strangling our recovery, it is not actually enough for the Central Bank to effect a general cut in interest rates at the risk of deepening the liquidity trap – what is required is a genuine policy of differentiated credit conditions based on the Lisbon objectives."@en1
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