Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-22-Speech-2-022"
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"en.20050222.4.2-022"2
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".
Mr President, thank you. I think that Mr Karas was right in saying that in this debate, this Parliament is involved in a kind of battle about the direction we should take and in a debate about how to address macro-economic policy in the European Union.
I often have the strong impression that in this debate, the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats, as well as sections of the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe are busy fighting the previous battle and are still, while being wedged in old discussions, working out reforms about the Stability and Growth Pact and fail to face today’s challenges head-on. Moreover, I often have the impression that we are engaged in national politics and that this House pursues national discussions rather than focusing on the European dimension.
My group prefers the approach for which the Commission has opted with regard to reforming the Stability and Growth Pact and also the approach that the Luxembourg Presidency has adopted in this regard. I would refer to the decisions taken by the ECOFIN Council on 13 September, which clearly favour reform of the Stability and Growth Pact within the context of wider discussions and also in relation to the Lisbon strategy and the global guidelines for economic policy.
Reform of the Stability Pact should address the preventive aspects, the differences in economic developments in the Member States and the corrective aspects, while also promoting an improvement in the excessive deficit procedure. What is of key importance in this, though, and that is something which our group would like to emphasise and which President Bush echoed recently in the context of foreign policy, is that we should pursue true macro-economic policy in Europe and, in this respect, treat Europe as an economic unit, a single entity. I think that that should very much be part of macro-economic policy, that we do not in the first instance compete as Member States against each other, and create distinct profiles for ourselves which also need defending in terms of the Stability and Growth Pact, but that we opt for this European perspective and adopt economic policies in line with that.
That is why close examination of the Lisbon strategy and also of its link with the reform of the Stability and the Growth Pact is necessary; that is also why my group is still keen to underline in that discussion that we should focus on investments and also on how we, within the parameters prescribed in that Stability and Growth Pact, should draw a distinction between current expenses and expenses that are really intended for investment in that knowledge economy that we seek as part of that Lisbon strategy. We do not want to do this in a way that Member States can decide how to do their accounts creatively, but by making choices that are clearly intended for Europe and by setting out a strategy at European level so that it is possible, for example, to depreciate investments made in the long term, as is customary in industry.
We do hope that some of these points will be addressed in those reports and that this discussion will be followed up in the March plenary, when we will be reviewing the Lisbon strategy and preparing for the spring summit."@en1
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