The Lisbon strategy and the open method of co-ordination

This “Policy Paper” published by Notre
Europe aims at providing a critical evaluation of the
Lisbon Strategy and provides a total of 12 recommendations to
enhance its effectiveness.

Noting the transformations brought about by globalisation and
the development opportunities arising from new technologies, the
European Council identified at its Lisbon meeting, in March 2000, a
series of weaknesses in the European economy: long-term structural
unemployment, a poor employment rate, and under-development of the
service sector. In an often-quoted sentence, it has therefore
assigned the EU “a new strategic goal for the next decade: to
become the most competitive and most dynamic knowledge-based
economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth, with
more and better and greater social cohesion.” This however as we
will see next was a second best policy option as the initial idea
was to have a better macroeconomic policy mix, in other words a
better interaction between the economic policies of the 12 Member
States that share the Euro and of these with the European Central
Bank. This strategy failed as some Member States resisted demands
to co-ordinate their economic policies and nowadays the EU is still
faced with twelve uncoordinated fiscal policies and one monetary
policy.

The Lisbon strategy aims at realising the “knowledge society” by
encouraging research, developing information technologies and
establishing a favourable climate for innovation, by speeding up
the removal of obstacles to the freedom of service provision and
the liberalisation of the transport and energy markets. At the same
time, it stresses the necessity to modernise the European social
model, inter alia by increasing employment, reforming social
protection systems in order to confront the ageing population, and
by struggling against social exclusion. Sustainable development was
later added. Even though this ambitious program, which endeavours
to reconcile economic competitiveness with social concerns, has not
really had the
expected mobilising effect on public opinion, the method devised
for its implementation has been the focus of much interest.

Last year, the European Council asked a high level group chaired
by former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok to carry out an evaluation
of the progress achieved so far. The group’s report, together with
the Commission’s own recommendations will serve as a basis for the
European Council’s mid-term review of the Lisbon Strategy. This
Notre Europe Policy Paper aims at providing a critical evaluation
of the Lisbon Strategy and at providing a number of recommendations
to enhance its effectiveness. The paper starts by pointing out the
main
features of the Lisbon process. It proceeds by making an assessment
of the main problems that have been impeding an efficient
implementation of that process. Issues such as the absence of a
sound European policy mix, the lack of co-ordination between
relevant players, the use of the OMC, the role of management by
objectives and indicators and the legitimacy of the whole exercise
are discussed. Following this discussion, we present twelve
recommendations that if applied would in our perspective lead to a
simplified, clearer and more efficient implementation of the Lisbon
strategy.

Please click here
to read the full text of the study.