Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-12-15-Speech-2-321"
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"Mr President, thank you very much to Mr Verhofstadt, who initiated this debate, and to everyone who has spoken. I am very grateful to you for your contributions and ideas.
We are, however, seeing positive signs, which it is also important to say in a debate such as this. We would not have been able to say this in a similar debate in October 2008. In December 2009, it must be said that there are positive signs, that we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel, including in the countries that are suffering the most as a result of this crisis, such as Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Ireland.
We are still facing a great deal of uncertainty, and the obstacles that we have to tackle are very significant, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.
So once the recession has been overcome, will we go back to doing the same as we did before it? I really hope not! As this is my last speech in Parliament on the economy as Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, allow me to give you five points that are not among Mr Verhofstadt’s six points, which we should all debate.
Firstly, in the light of our experience of this crisis, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe need a much more balanced model for growth. They cannot depend solely and exclusively on finance from foreign investment. Many of you have talked about small and medium-sized enterprises, and I agree with you. They also cannot depend solely and exclusively, or almost exclusively, on foreign banks, because when it comes to supervising the actions of the financial system, it is very difficult to have supervisory authorities and a financial policy that serves the interests of each country if practically all the banks are not from that country and take strategic decisions based on the interests of their country of origin. Having said that, it must be said that the foreign banks in those countries are conducting themselves extraordinarily well, as I have already said.
We must increase the take-up rate of the Structural Funds. In the current financial perspectives, we have proposed a very large amount of resources for your approval, which can be channelled through the Structural Funds during this financial perspectives period. In many cases, countries are not managing to use these resources, and there is still scope for action, in some countries amounting to 4% of their annual GDP. 4% of annual GDP and this money is not being used adequately.
We need to provide much more support for the integration of infrastructures, and we need to continue to debate how to do so. There are bottlenecks in parts of the region that have not yet been overcome through infrastructures to integrate their economic area and productive fabric sufficiently within Western Europe.
Finally the consequences of the crisis are being felt more, in social terms, in the countries that do not have a sufficient social protection system or welfare state. This is the case partly because they do not have a sufficient level of growth, income or wealth, but it is partly the case because, it has to be said, during the years prior to the crisis, in some of those countries, there was a ‘less is more’ tax policy, and when money is needed to fund public action there is none, because there is no income. This is also something to consider for the future.
Allow me to begin with a phrase used by Mr Verhofstadt. He said that the fact that there are countries in Central and Eastern Europe that are not part of the euro area means that there is a
(an iron curtain). I do not agree, because some of the Central and Eastern European countries that are not yet in the euro are in extraordinarily difficult economic situations, but there are others whose economic situations are no more difficult than those of more mature, more advanced economies. The latter have belonged to the European Union for much longer, have been receiving finance from the European Investment Bank and the Structural Funds for much longer and are in the euro area, and they have equally serious or sometimes more serious problems than many of the economies of Central and Eastern Europe.
The problem is therefore not an iron curtain, which has not existed for twenty years, and it is not that the instruments available to the European Union are not being used in that region, because they are being used as I said in my initial speech. Some of you have alluded to this while others appear to be unaware that instruments are being used to a much greater extent than we could have imagined when this crisis began in 2007.
With the greatest respect, the problem is not how the criteria for entering the euro are interpreted, and we have debated this many times in this House. That is not the problem. There has been criticism in this House of those who, at the time, decided to allow some current members of the euro area to join it when it was not very clear whether the conditions had been fulfilled. What we are now seeing is that the economies that are not well prepared to deal with a crisis such as this are suffering the most, both within and outside the euro area. This is the problem that we should be concerned with.
Do we need to cooperate more? Of course we do. Do we need to strengthen the European instruments? Of course we do. The Commission is asking the Council and Parliament to do so. Parliament is also asking the Commission to do so, and what I am asking Parliament is to ask the Council to do so, because the Commission’s proposal for the actions of the European Social Fund in 2009 and 2010 to be 100% funded by European resources in those countries that benefit from the European Social Fund has not been accepted by the Council. I would be very grateful if you could say this to the Council.
This is the last time that I will be here in my role as Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, and I want to convey your position, which is also my own, to the ECOFIN Council. Indeed, I believe that it is important, at times like these, to use the Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund in a different way from that envisaged under normal circumstances. I shall continue in my mother tongue.
I agree. I agree with many of the ideas in the six points that Mr Verhofstadt mentioned, which he included in a letter to the President of the European Commission and to the President of the European Investment Bank. We agree in many respects. In many respects, we are already acting in line with the points that he made. I cited these straight away when I first spoke.
However, to think that by using European instruments, it is possible to avoid having to make difficult adjustments in order to deal with the consequences of a recession such as this shows a lack of awareness of the depth of the recession that we have suffered, both within and outside the euro area, in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in Western Europe. It has been of such depth that we can imagine how, for example, Ireland has made such extremely difficult adjustments, not because the International Money Fund says so, or because it has been imposed by anyone from Brussels, but because the Irish authorities consider it to be the best way to adjust its economy as soon as possible and move forward with the same impetus that it had before the crisis.
The social consequences of these adjustments concern us and concern me personally, just as much or even more than they concern Parliament. I can tell you, as it is public knowledge, that by using the balance of payments facility, the Commission has reduced many of the adjustments proposed by the governments of the countries benefiting from those resources. We are going to continue to do this. We have also tried, as far as possible, to preserve the amounts in the national budgets in order to be able to jointly finance the European funds, because otherwise, the reductions in investment expenditure that would have to be used to jointly finance European funds would have had very negative consequences in those countries."@en1
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