17 March 2005

CER: The Lisbon Scorecard V: Can Europe compete?

The Centre for European Reform released a new report on the ‘Lisbon’ reform strategy being half-way through its ten years programme. As the report states, it is even further away from its stated objective of becoming the world’s most competitive economy. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to write the Lisbon agenda off, the CER’s annual Lisbon review argues.

Since the start of the Lisbon programme in 2000, the EU has thrown open is markets for energy, telecoms, financial services and, to some degree, transport. The EU member-states have passed a raft of measures to reform labour markets and pension systems. And more is to come. Competition from the EU’s new members in Central and Eastern Europe has turned up the heat on the slow growing ‘core’ economies, Germany, Italy and France.

For the first time the repor includes a table ranking all EU member-states on their economic reform performance. Sweden tops the ranking, with Denmark and Finland not far behind. Austria, the Netherlands and the UK also score highly, while Ireland is rapidly climbing the table.

Moreover, several of the new member-states, most notably Hungary, Slovenia and the Baltic states, stand out for rapid progress towards Lisbon goals.

Both Germany and France have been dragging their feet on parts of the Lisbon agenda, but Germany is freeing up its labour market under Chancellor Schroeder’s Agenda 2010 and France is making its pension system more sustainable and the 35-hour week more flexible.

Italy, however, continues to do badly in terms of GDP and productivity growth, and the Berlusconi government has largely squandered the opportunity to introduce much-needed changes in the first half of the decade. The scorecard therefore concludes that Italy is the villain of the first five years of the Lisbon agenda.

Report
Press release

© CER