Brussels, 26/06/2014 (Agence Europe) - An internal study carried out by the European Parliament shows that member states did little to implement the previous country-specific social and economic policy recommendations from Brussels. On Friday 27 June, the European summit will approve new recommendations for the 2014 European Semester (see EUROPE 11105 and 11092).
The Support for Economic Governance Unit at the European Parliament looked at how the member states have applied the recommendations for 2011 and 2012, based on reports by the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the OECD. It divided the recommendations into three categories - fully implemented, ones on which a lot of work has been done in the country in question and those on which very little or no work has been done.
The EP report shows that governments have on average fully implemented 18% of the recommendations for 2011 and 2012 and done very little or no work on 43% of them. Nine member states are top of the league when it comes to implementation: Spain (35%), Denmark (30%), Latvia (28%), the Netherlands (26%), Sweden (24%), Italy (23%), Slovakia (23%), Lithuania (22%) and Hungary (20%), which all perform better than the EU average. Bottom of the league are France (3%), Slovenia (7%), Belgium (7%), Germany (9%) and Malta (9%).
Examining the recommendations on which little or no work was done, the EP report found that the EU average was 43%. The worst offenders were Slovenia (64%), Belgium (63%), Malta (60%), Cyprus (59%), Bulgaria (58%), Germany (53%), the Czech Republic (52%), Slovakia (51%), Hungary (50%), Poland (50%), the United Kingdom (50%), Austria (49%), France (48%) and Luxembourg (45%).
Under the European semester process, the European summit approves the social and economic policy recommendations drawn up by the European Commission based on member states' stability and reform programmes. The recommendations are meant to be incorporated in member states' draft budgets for the following year, but are not legally binding on governments. (MB)