Brussels, 08/04/2015 (Agence Europe) - In a policy paper published at the end of March, the Jacques Delors Institute criticises the triple whammy or 'triple penalty' that macroeconomic conditionality could impose on the regions of Europe.
Introduced in the recent Regulation on the European Structural Funds (ESF), this clause allows the European Commission to re-programme partnership agreements with countries and suspend related payments “where this is necessary to support the implementation of relevant Council Recommendations or to maximise the growth and competitiveness impact of the EFSI funds” (see EUROPE 11285).
Marjorie Jouen, who wrote the policy paper, describes as an “inappropriate link” the connection between public deficits and the European Structural Funds: “Yet the Cohesion Policy cannot be directly blamed for the debts or for the excessive public deficits of certain member states, because the sums paid out by the EU have never been in excess of 4% of national GDP.” She feels that the idea of suspending Cohesion Policy payments is a “pointless risk” and would even be dangerous for the regions in question. The EFSI has acquired greater weight as a share of public investment as a result of the crisis (from 11.5% in 2007 to 18.1% in 2013). “The introduction of a threat to ERDI and EST credits when a member state is in difficulty may seem like a contradiction,” she writes. She criticises reprogramming as a “questionable method for turning the Cohesion Policy into an anti-cyclical tool,” seeing it as a threat to democratic order because it “leads implicitly to a questioning of the principles of partnership and multi-level governance that underlie the Cohesion Policy and its primary added-value over all of the sectoral policies.”
A source at the Committee of the Regions (CoR) told this newsletter that when the Regulation was adopted, the CoR considered taking the macroeconomic conditionality clause to the European Court of Justice on the grounds that it damages the principle of subsidiarity. It decided against this in the end because the partnership agreements are signed by the Commission with countries directly rather than with the regions. All the same, the source said that the CoR was prepared to help any European region that decided following a reprogramming or suspension of payments to take the Commission to the European Court of Justice. (Jean Comte)