Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-02-14-Speech-3-316"
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"en.20070214.22.3-316"2
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"I would like to begin by once again thanking the two rapporteurs and everybody who has been involved in the drawing up of these reports and this afternoon’s debate — which I believe has been extremely illuminating — on the situation we are experiencing and the challenges we need to face.
The situation — to use a Castilian figure of speech, though I believe that similar expressions are used in the few languages that I know of other countries of the Union – can be defined optimistically as a half-full bottle, or, if not pessimistically, then at least if we are to place the emphasis on what still needs to be done, as a half-empty bottle.
At the beginning of the debate, some of you asked me, ‘Is the growth we are seeing cyclical or does it also have structural components?’, ‘Will the improvement in employment just be temporary for as long as the economic expansion lasts or is it true that we are achieving a better combination of economic efficiency, more employment and greater social cohesion?’ I believe that it is a combination of the two elements.
I believe that the structural reforms that have been carried out over recent years, together with the budgetary discipline and the macroeconomic policies, the mix of macroeconomic policies implemented since the launch of the third phase of Economic and Monetary Union, are beginning to bear fruit. I believe that it is right that the European citizens should be aware that we are beginning to harvest that fruit, that the economic growth of close to 3%, the two million jobs created last year, the twelve million jobs created in the euro zone since 1 January 1999, the very good economic results of the huge majority of the new Member States, the greater consumer confidence and the increase in investment are linked to the efforts and decisions of recent years. It is not merely a matter of chance. Otherwise, how can we expect the citizens to believe us and support us when we say to them, ‘Look, we have to carry on with our efforts’?
We have to carry on improving the functioning of the markets in products, goods and services. We have to carry on integrating Europe’s financial systems. We have to carry on improving the quality of legislation in order to create a favourable environment for small and medium-sized businesses so that they can compete without any administrative burden, without a series of obstacles preventing them from moving forward. We need to provide good arguments so that we can ask workers to allow the improvement in the functioning of the labour markets to go ahead. Only by making that effort will we genuinely be able to offer high-quality jobs, a future for coming generations and a combination of environmental policies to combat climate change and energy policies that are capable of improving our competitiveness. Only by doing that will we be able to offer that result.
Therefore, the Lisbon Strategy reforms, which we must continue, call for effort and responsibility on the part of the European Institutions and the Member States, of the public institutions and of the public sector, and the citizens and companies in the private sector, but they also need to be based on certain steps forward that we are already taking and which must be demonstrated.
I do not believe, ladies and gentlemen, that the European institutions should draw up policies pessimistically and with the feeling that the future will be worse than the past, because if we do, if that is the only message the European institutions send out, the citizens will wonder what they want Europe for. Europe is the best instrument available to us in the 21st century, as the Lisbon Strategy stated from the outset, for making economic dynamism compatible with social cohesion and solidarity with future generations in terms of sustainability, with the elderly, with the environment and with future generations.
Finally, I would like to comment briefly on two aspects that have been raised in the debate. Firstly, the coordination of economic policies. If I remember rightly, the Messina Declaration back in 1955 — since we are now talking about the Berlin Declarations as if they are similar to the Messina Declaration — talked about the need to coordinate economic policies, but to that end, Mr García-Margallo, there is no need for you to give a humble Commissioner a mandate to become the next European Convention. What we need to do is to discuss the stability and convergence programmes in depth, as the Commission and the Ecofin Council are currently doing. What we need to do is to discuss the application of the national Lisbon reform programmes and the Community Lisbon Strategy in depth, as the Spring European Council is going to do, to discuss how to draw up a common energy policy that is compatible with an ambitious European environmental programme. We need to carry on integrating financial services, to carry on improving our internal market, which, as some of you have said, still provides Europe with an excellent tool for confronting globalisation with optimism. Furthermore — and this is more a job for national governments than for European directives, given the way things are — we need to improve the functioning of the labour markets, combining flexibility and security, because if there is no security for workers, there will be no flexibility in employment, and if there is no flexibility in companies, there will be no jobs for workers.
Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that that is the message that emerges from this debate, and the Commission is entirely in agreement."@en1
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