Europe in 12 lessons (PDF)

Europe in 12 lessons
One of the EU’s priorities is to step up investment
in people and training, which are
Europe’s chief assets. The European Union
recognises the importance of education and
lifelong learning, the need to learn several
languages and to have technological skills.
The lack of well-qualified personnel is a
handicap for Europe’s telecommunications
and Internet services.
Through programmes such as Socrates,
Leonardo and the Youth programme, the
European Union encourages students, teachers
and research workers to move around in
Europe. It is also taking steps to ensure that
training periods spent and qualifications
obtained in any one EU country are recognised
in all others.
Finally, the Lisbon strategy involves tackling
one of Europe’s most intractable problems –
the fact that its population is ageing, and
the serious implications this has for the
workforce and for the financing of Europe’s
social security and pension schemes. There
are not enough Europeans in work, especially
women and older people. At the same
time, long-term unemployment is endemic
in some regions of the EU and unemployment
in general varies considerably from one
region to another.
So the Lisbon European Council aimed to
raise the employment rate from an average
of 61% in 2000 to 70% in 2010, and to
increase the proportion of women in work
from 51% to 60% over the same period.
To tackle the effects of ageing on European
societies, the Barcelona European Council in
March 2002 called on EU governments to
reduce ‘early retirement incentives for individuals
and the introduction of early retirement
schemes by companies’. By 2010, there
should be ‘a progressive increase of about
five years in the effective average age at
which people stop working in the European
Union’.
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