Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-03-13-Speech-2-547-000"
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"en.20120313.22.2-547-000"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, through today’s vote, we will officially give the green light to the procedure leading to the adoption of the 2013 budget.
A pure ‘net EU budget contributor/net EU budget beneficiary’ approach does not take due account of the great positive spill-over effects the EU budget produces between Member States to the benefit of common EU policy goals.
When it comes to budgets at times of crisis, the key word is definitely austerity, and I do not think we can ignore that at the moment. However, I think that the EU will never be able to respond properly to the current economic and social crisis or prevent future crises without further political integration, common instruments and measures to strengthen solidarity between the Member States.
There are a number of problems related to the crisis which are troubling the European economies: the reduced competitiveness of our businesses, problems in accessing credit, and the extremely high levels of unemployment, especially among young people. Indeed, I would like to reflect just briefly on young people. The youth of today are more educated, technologically advanced and mobile, and we must support them because they are – and will be – the most important resource for growth in the Union.
Unfortunately, however, the statistics to hand are alarming: one young person in five under the age of 25 is looking for work and cannot find it. Moreover, we have 7.5 million young people under the age of 24 who are not in work or education. Accordingly, I think it is essential to use the resources at our disposal to help young people to develop skills that meet the needs of the job market, guaranteeing opportunities for work experience and training in order to ease their path into the world of work.
I strongly believe that in order to respond properly to these problems, we need to implement a ready-made and coordinated European initiative, including targeted investments to ensure that we meet the objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy for growth and jobs, particularly in terms of youth employment.
In this context, supporting small and medium-sized enterprises takes on fundamental significance, as they have the biggest potential for economic growth and innovation, and have provided 85% of new jobs over the last decade. Young people, growth and competitiveness: these are the targets that Parliament has put at the centre of its budget for 2013, both to quell the crisis and to get the European economy moving again, once and for all.
The guidelines that we will vote on tomorrow do not go into the specifics of the individual headings and policies. Part of the reason for this is that it would be too early: we are waiting for the Commission to present the draft budget before starting to work on the numbers, when we will be depending on the valuable contribution of each specialised committee for their guidance.
We do, however, want to send a message to all Member States, which concerns the major added value that the EU brings. National budgets alone are not enough and no Member State can think about getting through this period by itself. Accordingly, we need to find real synergies between national and European budgets during the European Semester.
I must add one final thought on the issue of payments: 2013 is the seventh and final year of the financial perspectives: we all remember what happened during last year’s conciliation procedure and, hence, we have got to expect an increase in payment needs. Therefore, Parliament hereby declares that it will not look favourably on any artificial cuts in budget payments, because this puts us in danger of coming to an unsustainable level of payments in 2013."@en1
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