Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-03-09-Speech-3-155"
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"en.20050309.15.3-155"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, even though the ECOFIN meeting at the beginning of this week has still not finally resolved the issue of how the stability criteria are to be evaluated in the future, I do very much hope that the finance ministers will nevertheless come to an agreement before the European Council.
For my own part, I remain convinced that the foundations of the Stability and Growth Pact must not be tampered with. The current threshold values – 3% for new debt and 60% for outstanding debt, measured in terms of gross national product – are so closely entwined with the euro’s exchange rate that they must be retained if the single currency is to be kept stable and solid. It is also fundamental to the Pact that a state’s budget should be considered as a single whole when assessing compliance with the criteria; this is not just prescribed by general budgetary law, but also enjoined upon us by sound human reason. A single, integral budget cannot be evaluated both with and without whole categories of expenditure. That is why we cannot have the situation in which categories of expenditure that some Member States regard as special burdens are excluded when assessing to what degree the stability criteria have been adhered to.
After all, the Pact – containing as it does also a substantial growth component – does make provision for the possible nuanced valuation of a national budget in the light of the country’s current position in the economic cycle. For that reason, the current procedures have to be retained, while making their detailed course and consequences dependent on the realities of budget policy, and this – as I told the House a few weeks ago – for the reason that the Pact is called a ‘Stability and Growth Pact’ and excessive stability must not be allowed to hamper growth rather than it being stimulated.
The ECOFIN Council has listed possible approaches to a more finely-honed evaluation of the nation states’ efforts at achieving stability. I very much hope that some of these will prove the key to bringing about a final agreement prior to the summit on 22 and 23 March.
Let me now just say something else about the Lisbon strategy. The disappointing results at the end of its first half are, in essence, attributable to a too widely-dispersed range of goals. That is why, if we are to end up with tangible successes after the next five years, we need to concentrate on a number of essential objectives, and so I am in favour of an approach that relies more than hitherto on the nation states implementing the Lisbon requirements. This allows a certain degree of competition around what are termed ‘best practices’
that can in fact do nothing but good in terms of the strategy’s overall success. In future, we should cut the really big announcements down to size if it is not absolutely certain that they will actually be implemented."@en1
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