Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-19-Speech-3-074"
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, our attention needs to be focused on two crucial questions.
The first question is whether enlargement is conceivable without a powerful structure and cohesion policy. The second question is how the policy on economic and social cohesion should in future continue to focus on regions that lag behind current Member States developmentally, and what are the objectives that need to be met. Both questions were extensively dealt with during the informal Regional Policy Council which was held recently in Namur on 13 July last.
With regard to the first question, everyone has accepted that enlargement will bring with it a substantial increase in needs in terms of social and economic cohesion. That was also clearly underlined in the Commission’s second report on economic and social cohesion. The figures in the report speak for themselves. Following on enlargement, discrepancies will become more pronounced in two ways. Firstly, the section of the population in regions with a Gross Domestic Product per capita that is less than 75% of the current EU average will double, and that means that the number of inhabitants that fall within the scope of present objective 1 of the Structural Funds will increase from 19% in the EU of Fifteen Members to 36% in an EU comprising twenty-seven Member States.
Secondly, discrepancies will increase in extent. Today’s average Gross Domestic Product per capita in the underprivileged regions stands at 66% of the EU average. If one adds to this the less developed regions of the candidate countries, the average Gross Domestic Product per capita drops back to less than half of the EU average, to only 77% to be precise.
On the basis of the above data, one can conclude that with enlargement, the cohesion problem doubles in terms of its original scope and its original extent. Poverty and inequality are persistent problems and we realise that we will need to fight them for a long time yet to come. Even if the candidate countries were to grow faster than the amalgamated countries have done in the past ten years, even then, the current level of the Gross Domestic Product per capita would imply a convergence process spanning at least two generations. Even with the Irish rate of growth of the past ten years, it would take twenty years to reach 90% of the Gross Domestic Product per capita of the fifteen EU Member States.
It is from that perspective that today’s priorities and objectives of our regional policy must be viewed. Even the management itself of the outlined package of measures is an important element, in the sense that we should not overlook the fact that at present, most candidate countries do not have appropriate structures in place to manage properly the regional policy in the way we in most cases propose.
Having said that, during the informal Council in Namur, we were given a clear signal that it is necessary to continue to support the current underprivileged regions in the European Union. The present objectives pertaining to the underprivileged regions, both in the Member States and in the candidate countries, must be supported in a fair manner. That will inevitably need to go hand in hand with an even more efficient deployment of Community resources.
There is therefore unanimity as regards the continuation of the present regional policy concerning those regions which continue to face structural difficulties."@en1
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