Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-03-14-Speech-3-263"
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"en.20010314.10.3-263"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I am somewhat surprised to hear that the euro will be born in nine months. I rather thought that the euro had already been born and thank goodness it has, because just imagine what would have happened between the European economies if the European currencies were still competing with each other now that the American economy has gone into decline. But that is by the by.
As the rapporteur said, the year 2000 was a good year for the European economy, from the point of view of the rate of growth, from the point of view of price stability and from the point of view of employment. Of course, nothing is perfect in this imperfect world and, as the rapporteur points out, the rate of inflation is set to exceed 2%, the stability criteria set by the European Bank, for the second year running, but not to a sufficiently serious extent to give us particular cause for concern. From our point of view, we would have considered it more worthwhile to stress that, although certain progress has been and is still being made, unemployment is still at 8%, which is unacceptably high in a social market economy, the principles of which the rapporteur feels – and I agree with him – should guide our policy. In this respect, I am surprised that, in listing the features of a social
market economy, the rapporteur does not include full employment in his list, despite the fact that he comes from a country in which cooperation between companies and employees is, I think, the most advanced or one of the most advanced in Europe and does the German economy and German society proud.
As far as we are concerned, full employment should be the be all and end all of a modern economy. Not, as you might assume, for ideological reasons, although of course ideological reasons are not easily dismissed, but for reasons of competitiveness. An economy does not become competitive merely by achieving low costs or by having leading edge technology. Competitiveness is judged by whether it makes full use of its wealth-creating resources in comparison with other economies. Unless it does, it will not manage to become competitive, which is precisely why full employment – and not just full employment but increasing the ratio between the adult population and the work force by 60% for women and 70% for men – is not just a social, it is primarily an economic demand, and why it is at the epicentre of the policy which was announced by the Council summit in Lisbon and which will be reiterated, I hope, at the coming Council summit in Stockholm.
We should take every opportunity to remind ourselves and the citizens of Europe that our Union has engaged in a huge economic venture in order to gain its rightful place at the economic vanguard of the world. This venture is based on the triad of a knowledge economy, full employment and renovation of the social state. These three factors form a unit, each feeds the other and they express the exact link between social solidarity and economic competitiveness. Just as there is no such thing as efficient solidarity without competitiveness, competitiveness will collapse if it is not built on social solidarity.
Our rapporteur insists on the technological aspects of economic superiority. We believe that equal weight must be given to social aspects such as equal opportunities, a fair distribution of income and closing the gap between the rich and the poor. And if we too had made an effort to impose self-control on the markets at worldwide level, at least to the extent to which we are able to exert an influence, we would perhaps not now have reached a point at which we are threatened by the imminent economic crisis in the United States. I do not know what happened to close Wall Street. At lunchtime it was still in free fall and it is threatening to drag us down into a slump with it. We must protect ourselves from the extremes of a non-social economy. If we want a social economy, we must give it real meaning, based on solidarity and the fight against speculation; words alone will get us nowhere."@en1
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