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Fico: Europe 2020 Wearing Rose-coloured Glasses as Predecessor Did
Friday 26 March 2010 Zoom in | Print page
Brussels, March 26 (TASR) - Prime Minister Robert Fico at a press conference early Friday criticised the new Strategy for Growth and Employment (Europe 2020) as being too ambitious – just like its predecessor the Lisbon Strategy, which in 2000 set out to make Europe the world's most-competitive economy by 2010 but, according to conventional wisdom, failed.
The new document has emerged from the ongoing European Union two-day summit, and it provides the general framework the European Council hopes to see ratified by national parliaments.
Later Friday, five points are to be addressed by the Council: employment, spending on science and research, emissions quotas, education, and the poverty threshold.
In his critique, Fico points out that spending on science and research, for example, is proposed to be raised to 3 percent of GDP over the next decade. "In Slovakia we expect this figure in 2015 at around 1.8 percent to 1.9 percent of GDP," he said.
He conceded that goals in the draft strategy are considered for the European Union as a whole and each country is allowed to frame its own national programmes – and those goals may differ from the EU's. "My concern is that if we consider all national programme together it would hardly add up to what the European Union seeks to achieve as a whole," he said.
Paradoxically, the draft underscores ambitious goals but on the other observes that in the last two years we have faced the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s.
All that notwithstanding, Fico says that Slovakia will adopt the EU draft – but it will be accompanied by a Slovak programme.
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