Authors Iain Begg | Gabriel Glöckler | Anke Hassel ... - The Europaeum

help by ensuring a thorough audit and continuous assessment of EU skills
and labour market needs up to 2020, building upon the Commission’s
New Skills for New Jobs initiative. Skills shortages and mismatches in the
labour market can also be partly offset by increased labour mobility: more
transparent information on labour market trends and skills requirements
across the EU would contribute to the promotion of occupational, sector
and geographical mobility.
Promoting innovation through financial incentives
The crisis will change the economic and social landscape of the all 27 EU
member states in unexpected ways – and it will affect them all very
differently. This gives the EU institutions, policies and processes the
chance to prove their added value, to find out what works and bring it up,
to formulate and implement innovative policy solutions and to ensure
that the positive experience in one country is not lost to others.
The most effective way of facilitating this process of adding value is by
providing real financial incentives. There will be no credible social role for
the EU in the future without money – but money is scarce and should be
demonstrably well spent on common priorities, i.e. with a better link and
conditionality between policy priorities and financial instruments. The
forthcoming EU budget review serves as an opportunity to enhance the
role of funding − especially for marking out the European Social Fund
(ESF) as a key provider of financial incentives for the implementation of
core EU objectives and for the promotion of social innovation.
Three simple principles for policy design and delivery are needed:
conditionality and the concentration of resources exclusively on key
common EU policy priorities, framed by flexicurity and skills; the systemic
impact of interventions; and clear management structures. The main
obstacle is that the current system of EU funds delivery is so extraordinarily
cumbersome that policymakers focus only on the verification of
expenditure as opposed to verification of outcomes, thus EU citizens lose
faith in the entire policy. EU institutions treat member states on a par
with the most destitute developing countries − administrations so
unreliable that they cannot be entrusted with the management and
delivery of international assistance. It is extraordinary that the EU can
transfer 50 million euro to a developing country’s national budget for
structural adjustment with just a broad policy conditionality attached,
and yet the transfer − from the same EU owned resources – of 50, 000
euro to a member state’s budget from the Structural Funds requires ironfisted
rules for the financial verification of expenditure but no real policy
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After the crisis: A new socio-economic settlement for the EU