Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-19-Speech-3-087"
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"en.20010919.7.3-087"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, like all of you, I am very pleased that both the President-in-Office of the Council and the Commissioner responsible for territorial policy have agreed firstly that it will be necessary in the future, with enlargement, to have a dual cohesion policy, although it is of a minority nature: the cohesion policy for the regions belonging to the fifteen current Members and the supplementary cohesion policy for the enlargement countries.
I also note that they agreed on an issue which seems to me essential and in no way hypocritical: there can be no political Europe without an economic Europe, there can be no political Europe without a cohesion policy. That is also the case in the current States, and the European Union must assume these responsibilities in the future.
How can it be done? How can it be achieved and with what instruments? We clearly have to improve the current application of the Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund. We only have to look at the differences between Ireland and Spain, in terms of results over past years, or between Portugal and Italy or Greece, if you will allow me. The application has been different, and as such Ireland has made extraordinary progress and Portugal has taken better advantage of the Structural Funds than many other States. This has not been the case with Spain, Italy or Greece, where, while State income has come closer to the Community average, this has not been the case in their internal regions, which indicates that the Funds are being badly applied, possibly because the State has taken advantage of the funds intended for the regions or because the policy of additionality has not been applied in the State.
Mr Barnier, you have said, and you had said previously, that the Structural and Cohesion Funds cannot be below 0.46% of Community GDP. I would remind you that this is the level they had in 1999 and that in 2006 it will be 0.31%. If in 1999, in view of the result, we had not managed to eliminate differences between the regions of Europe by means of these Funds, we must therefore be much more ambitious than you are proposing, although you have done so in a very positive way."@en1
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