Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-26-Speech-4-012"
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".
Mr President, I would like to thank the rapporteurs for their presentations of the three reports that we are going to discuss in a combined fashion, and we in the Commission are pleased about this.
A month and a half ago, on 12 April, Vice-President Verheugen, Commissioner Špidla and myself had the opportunity to present to this Parliament the integrated package of guidelines for the review and application of the Lisbon Strategy, combining the two instruments laid down in the Treaty into a single communication, a single discussion and a single strategy: the broad economic policy guidelines and the employment guidelines.
The Commission considers it essential to maintain this integrated approach. The two instruments based on the Treaty — the broad economic policy guidelines and the employment guidelines — have the same objective, though with a different approach and at differing levels: to increase our growth, to increase levels of employment, and, on this basis, to enhance social cohesion, the social model that is laid down in the objectives of the Lisbon Strategy, and socially and environmentally sustainable development — another of the principal elements of the Lisbon Strategy — and naturally all of this should be done in a way that improves our competitiveness and our capacity to continue growing. This integrated approach is therefore the first element I wanted to refer to, in accordance, furthermore, with the opinion of Parliament.
In the time I have left before my colleague Mr Špidla speaks — Mr Verheugen cannot be here today, unfortunately — I am going to comment on the report by Mr Goebbels on the broad economic policy guidelines.
In his report, Mr Goebbels draws attention to the excessive pessimism amongst operators, amongst investors and consumers with regard to the European economy. I entirely agree with that assessment and I share his concern about the lack of confidence. In the European economy, the conditions are currently in place to grow more than we are actually growing. In particular, in some of the biggest national economies in the euro zone, we should be growing more and, to this end, we need to increase confidence amongst investors and consumers, because the objective conditions are in place.
As well as the confidence problem, we have a problem of disparity of situations, which, since we have decided to have a single monetary policy, presents us with a challenge on which both the Commission and the Council and, in particular, the Eurogroup, are working: how to respond, within a context of budgetary discipline — we are going to discuss the reform of the Stability and Growth Pact in this Parliament in a few days time — and on the basis of coordination of economic policies, of the broad economic policy guidelines, to that disparity of situations in such a way that, by applying recommendations adapted to the specific circumstances of each of the national economies, the whole of the euro zone and the whole of the European Union can coordinate their economic policies and we can all achieve a better result.
We are going to debate this disparity of situations in a coming meeting of the Eurogroup working on the basis of a report that the Commission has been asked to present. But we also want each of the countries to define their own priorities and, in this way, to increase ‘ownership’; hence the importance of the national programmes that are going to be adopted at national level in the autumn. If there is one thing that the first five years of application of the Lisbon Strategy have taught us, it is that everybody claims to share the same objectives and strategies, but that not everybody has applied the recommendations that have emerged from that shared analysis of objectives and strategies.
Hence the importance of those national plans, which will be discussed again both by the Council and by the Commission and, no doubt, by Parliament. Hence — and in this regard I disagree with one of the comments in Mr Goebbels’s report — in order to increase ownership at national level and in order that the debate in the States may be a political debate in which the governments and the parliaments define the political priorities and instruments for political action, during this very year, on presenting this integrated package, the Commission has not included the guidelines at national level. But now, between June and July, we are going to hold preparatory meetings for the drawing up of the national programmes for each of the 25 Member States and, at those meetings, the Commission’s services, on the basis of the guidelines adopted by the College of Commissioners and discussed in this Parliament and also in the Council, will naturally propose a series of suggestions to each of the Member States for national priorities to help them to draw up those programmes as effectively as possible, and I hope that those programmes will truly allow us to realise the objectives which we share with the report by Mr Goebbels and the reports by Mrs Mato and Mrs Oomen-Ruijten."@en1
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