The European Union unveiled its flagship 10-year economic programme on Wednesday, aiming to boost growth and jobs while fighting climate change, but critics say the plan is unrealistic and fear it is doomed to fail.
Presenting the Europe 2020 strategy, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said the bloc's 27 governments needed to coordinate policy far better if they were to ward off future crises and prevent their economies drifting apart.
The programme, which succeeds the Lisbon Agenda, a 10-year plan put forward in 2000 that has widely been shown to have failed, focuses on innovation, research and development, education, clean energy and more flexible labour markets.
It also sets the stage for negotiations on how to divide hundreds of billions of euros in the European Union's next long-term budget, which projects spending for 2014-2021.
"To achieve results in 10 years we need to act now, there is a real sense of urgency," Barroso told a news conference after presenting his strategy. "The plan is about what we need to do today and tomorrow to get Europe back on track.
"We need to focus on the single market in more areas. More competition, better trade opportunities. Closing our eyes to the world won't make it go away," he said.
The programme, which will be discussed by EU leaders at a summit on March 25-26 before its planned approval in June, aims to prevent the bloc of 500 million people slipping behind economic and political rivals on the world stage.
A major challenge will be ensuring member states meet any national targets agreed once the overall plan is approved, as well as getting them to sign up in the first place. Germany, the EU's largest economy, has made clear it has reservations.
A fragile recovery from the economic crisis and fiscal problems in Greece and other EU states have sparked tensions in the euro currency area and added to doubts about whether the EU can match the economic strength of the United States and China.
Barroso insisted EU governments were ready to work together to make their economies function in a more united way.
"Divergences between member states have a direct impact on everyone else. We are more interdependent than ever. We need economic coordination now more than ever," he said.
DOOMED TO FAIL
But some diplomats and analysts doubt whether the plan can work, saying it will share the same fate as the Lisbon Agenda, which was supposed to turn the EU into the world's most competitive, dynamic economy by 2010.
"I don't see any substantive new elements in this programme. Why should it work if the previous one did not?" said Daniel Gros, head of the Centre for European Policy Studies, a think-tank.
Others are bemused by the idea of setting a 10-year project that harks back to the era of Soviet central planning.
The new plan sets its goals lower and Barroso says it will be easier to implement because EU leaders are now in agreement about the need for coordination on economic policy. The latest strategy also sets out fewer hard and fast targets.
It aims to boost employment across the EU workforce from 69 percent to 75 percent and increase investment in research and development from 1.9 percent to 3 percent of EU gross domestic product. [ID:nLDE621144]
Harmful carbon dioxide emissions should be cut by 20 percent compared with 1990 levels and the share of renewable energy sources in final energy consumption should rise to 20 percent. Energy consumption should fall by 20 percent. [ID:nLDE61N25I]
The number of EU citizens living in poverty is to be cut by about 20 million from the current 80 million.
To give the programme some teeth, Barroso has proposed that the Commission be entitled to recommend programmes for individual countries and name and shame laggards by sending early warnings in cases of inadequate responses.
But member states have reservations about such an approach and diplomats note that the Commision has struggled to enforce EU budget rules that set strict deficit ceilings, even though it has the ability to impose fines on those who miss targets.
The new plan has no goal for GDP, but Barroso said it was based on an assumption of annual growth of at least 2 percent.
One diplomat said the plan was important, because it will have an impact on negotiations on the EU's next, long-term budget, due to start this year, in which some countries will seek to slash the bloc's spending on farming and poor regions.
