Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-12-03-Speech-3-083"
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"en.20081203.13.3-083"2
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"Mr President, Mr Novelli, Mr Jouyet, Mrs Berès, ladies and gentlemen, less than a month ago in Strasbourg we spoke about the results and conclusions of the Washington meeting.
By coordinating actions, we can make one plus one equal three. Without coordination, one plus one might give a negative result. This is a clear example of the urgent need for coordination. Some countries have no room for manoeuvre, while others have to decide whether to use the room that they have. If we do not maximise every country’s energies and opportunities, we shall all lose out in the end. That is the message that the Commission put across to the Ecofin Ministers yesterday.
I have three very specific points to make.
First, in the previous debate, a Member of this Parliament said that the Stability and Growth Pact was no longer in force. As I have said to this Parliament on many occasions and I repeat again, the Stability and Growth Pact is in full force, and it is in full force because in 2005 we revised it and introduced the flexibility it needed to be of use in a situation such as this. The Pact is in force because we revised it in 2005, and there is no need to reinvent it or to change it. What we do need to do is implement it and respect it, but we must respect it within the limits and with the flexibility that budgetary policy requires at times like these.
Secondly, Mrs Berès referred to European debt securities. There are some major countries that clearly rule out this possibility and refuse to consider it. Should there be a joint issue of national public debt securities? There are some major euro area countries that reject this possibility. There is a third possibility, however, which has been given unanimous support and which we intend to use. It involves the European Investment Bank providing additional and more specific funding for those investments and measures considered essential for sustaining demand and maximising the impact of this Europe-wide endeavour at such a time as this.
Lastly, I fully agree with Mrs Berès’s call for quality jobs. When the Commission included in the recovery plan not only a fiscal endeavour but also ten priority actions for smart investments, what we were looking for was more growth, more sustainability and better quality employment than can be provided by some short-term measures. Such measures might admittedly be temporary, which is one of the requirements of the boost. They do not, however, have the other two properties needed for this to be a quality fiscal endeavour, namely that they must be able to boost and increase demand in the short term, and they must also expand the possibilities for our economies during the economic recovery which will certainly follow.
Today Mrs Berès is asking the Council and the Commission what steps need to be taken to put the conclusions into practice, who should take them and what action each European institution should take to that end.
I must say to her that I absolutely agree that these decisions, like those adopted since September 2007 in the Ecofin Council and the European Council, have to be made swiftly while respecting the roles of all the Community institutions. All the Community institutions must be involved in building a consensus, so that Europe can hold a single position on all the issues needed to regulate the financial system more effectively and to find solutions to its problems. The EU will thus continue to be able to lead the world in providing solutions at future meetings following on from the Washington meeting.
The Commission is of course working in this respect. We are playing our part within the de Larosière Group on one hand, and we are developing our own initiatives on the other. The Commission updated these announcements in the Ecofin Council only yesterday. In addition, the Commission is certainly going to use its own powers, in conjunction with the Council and Parliament, to reach the required agreements as soon as possible.
It is very important to coordinate the EU’s actions and positions in the financial field, because we are going to take part in a global coordination process, and Europe cannot go into global coordination holding several different positions. We have to go in with a single position that has been formally adopted within the European Union.
With regard to the economic recovery and reflationary plan discussed by the Ecofin Council yesterday, the Ministers agreed with the Commission’s view that, given the economic situation and the recession affecting the United States, Japan, the euro area and some major EU economies outside the euro area, a fiscal stimulus is essential. Monetary policy must continue to sustain demand, but it cannot bear the whole burden alone, especially in view of the current situation of the financial and credit markets.
Fiscal and budgetary policy has to provide a stimulus as well. The Commission proposed a stimulus that it considers both necessary and possible in a situation such as the one we are in. We specified the extent to which we will contribute with European resources and measures, both through the EU budget and through the actions of the European Investment Bank and the EBRD. I admit that a number of Ecofin members unfortunately did not welcome our proposal to both the Council and Parliament to make it possible to use unspent funds more flexibly without altering the overall ceiling of the EU’s budget, thus enabling us to devote the sum of EUR 5 billion to investment in infrastructure and fighting climate change at a European level.
Unfortunately the proposal did not gain enough unanimous support. Nonetheless, we hope it will go ahead. In addition to the European endeavour (through the EU’s budget plus the European Investment Bank, and here the Ministers did actually agree to increase the capital, as the Commission had proposed, by the end of 2009), we also asked the Member States to make an effort amounting to EUR 170 billion in 2009 by adopting what they considered to be the most appropriate demand-boosting measures in their current circumstances.
This proposal takes the Member States’ own responsibility into consideration, since they hold the budget for funding recovery through fiscal policy. It also takes account of the fact that not all Member States have the same room for manoeuvre. We cannot ask Hungary or Latvia to contribute as much right now as Germany or the Netherlands. That is not the Commission’s position, of course. All the Member States should benefit from the boost and the resulting recovery, whilst not all of them can contribute to the same extent because their starting situations are different. Coordination is therefore essential."@en1
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