Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-03-15-Speech-3-045"
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"en.20060315.3.3-045"2
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"Mr President, Mr Winkler, Mr Barroso, a strategy without resources is like Napoleon without an army: powerless and ultimately useless. That is the threat hovering over the Lisbon Strategy. With a meagre financial perspective, unbalanced national budgets and a Community budget representing less than a third of the American budget’s mere deficit, is the EU reduced merely to making gestures?
The draft resolution I have prepared together with my excellent fellow Member, Mr Lehne, indicates a few worthwhile paths to go down, even if our Parliament sometimes refuses to look the truth in the face. Thus, the majority of MEPs have ignored the fact that a substantial portion of the United States’s growth surplus in recent years was the result of integrating more than ten million legal immigrants. We need a more generous European immigration policy. Would such a policy be conducted at the expense of developing countries? According to the United Nations, transfers of money from immigrants to their families represent more than double the amount spent on international development aid. The spectacular economic development of India, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong owes a lot to companies set up by former emigrants who have returned home.
The Europe of research is still to be built. It is mainly medium-sized companies that do not invest enough. One of the causes of this phenomenon is the excessive bureaucracy hindering access to European funds. Another is the lack of cooperation between businesses and universities. The latter should be able to obtain more resources for themselves by investing in promising young talent and by increasing the prestige of their research activities through the conferring of associated diplomas and degrees.
Where energy is concerned, Europe must combine with the other big consumers – the United States, Japan, China and India – in order to counterbalance the cartels and oligopolies that dominate the oil and gas sectors. Faced with a market dominated by a handful of producer companies, there is no point in seeking refuge in the mere liberalisation of the European market, especially when such liberalisation leads to the emergence of a small number of so-called European champions which will end up dividing the market between themselves. In the case of the American energy market, liberalisation was far from being a success.
The demographic development faced by Europe constitutes more than just a challenge for the funding of social security. The ten or twenty years’ increase in life expectancy for generally fit and healthy populations also presents a great opportunity. Strategies need to be devised enabling people to remain active as they get older, as well as to be offered a range of retirement options and to be integrated into the wider life of society. Europe needs to stop talking in pessimistic terms about the future and instead to seize all the new opportunities for building the dynamic and inclusive society that the Lisbon Strategy is designed to bring about."@en1
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