Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-07-12-Speech-4-047"
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"Madam President, I would like to warmly congratulate you on having taken up this honourable office.
It is important to encourage Member States to form public-private partnerships and exchange good practice concepts in this field. The Commission and the Member States should effectively support projects that increase the regions' abilities to generate and absorb new technologies, while paying particular attention to protecting the natural environment.
An incredibly important problem for the poorest regions of the Union has been high levels of unemployment, up to 20%. In view of this, there is an urgent need to invest in human capital in poor regions through better education, constantly improving qualifications, especially for young people, women, and older people, as well as minorities at risk of social exclusion.
Support for equal opportunities for all should form part of all Community programmes, especially those which influence economic and social cohesion, as well as at all levels of planning and implementing projects within the framework of the European Union's cohesion policy.
The Commission and the Member States should ensure that accurate, comprehensive and comparable statistical data is available. This is something that we are currently lacking. The Commission should draw up a new method of measuring regional development, not only on the basis of GDP and unemployment rates, but also on the basis of other qualitative and quantitative indicators which reflect the real living standards of the population. We should also improve our methods of calculating purchasing power parity by developing regional rather than national indicators.
Taking advantage of the interim review of the Community budget in 2009, the Commission should analyse the effects of cohesion policy and investigate possible causes of undesirable results.
Finally, I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this report. I would like to thank you for your valuable amendments, which have enriched the document, and I sincerely hope that this own initiative report will provide the Member States and the regions with a host of valuable guidelines, as well as stimulating the European Commission to improve the effectiveness of cohesion policy in the most needy regions.
The European Union consists not only of 27 countries, but also of 268 regions, which have extremely different levels of development. As a result of the most recent enlargement to create a Union of 27 countries, the population of the Community rose to nearly 493 million. Around 30% of these people live in 100 of the poorest regions, namely those covered by the convergence objectives.
Each consecutive enlargement has resulted in greater inequality between the richest and the poorest regions in the Community. Now, in a Union of 27 countries, differences in the levels of GDP between the regions are significantly more pronounced than they were in the old fifteen, and amount to 24% in north-eastern Romania to 303% in central London.
The reasons for the economic under-development of specific regions vary greatly. The poorest regions mainly lack the basic infrastructure necessary for sustainable, long-term development, further investment and the necessary human resources. As statistics show, the existing European Union cohesion policy has effectively contributed to the development of many regions of countries which have long been included within its framework, such as Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain.
In accordance with the aims of the Community, as stated in Article 158 of the Treaty on European Union, which include harmonised development and the reduction of disparities between levels of development in different regions, we the European Parliament call for decisive action aimed at reducing the most serious cases of under-development in the poorest regions of the European Union.
The new Member States have been particularly affected by the difficulties related to absorbing EU funds, as the fact that they have been granted does not guarantee that they will be used properly, and the authorities in poor regions often do not have the ability, experience or resources required to fully benefit from the funds to which they are entitled.
The application procedures for structural fund aid are often extremely complicated and in no way transparent for the end user. We therefore call for these procedures to be simplified at all levels, namely at European, national and regional level.
The implementation of cohesion policy should take into account the varied needs of the regions, especially urban and rural areas, regions that are difficult to access, islands and ultraperipheral regions. It should adapt the aid provided to their conditions and specific characteristics, exploiting their potential for sustainable and long-term growth.
The Member States and the regions should therefore ensure that priority is granted to those projects that contribute to improving accessibility to the poorest regions, ensuring that they have a proper transport and information technology infrastructure. Cohesion policy should support entrepreneurship and investment in the poorest regions. New financial instruments, such as JEREMY and JESSICA, can successfully contribute to regional development, but awareness of how to use these instruments at a local and regional level is still very limited."@en1
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