Brussels, 11/02/2016 (Agence Europe) - As part of the second day of the Committee of the Regions (CoR) plenary session on Thursday 11 February, the Commissioner for Regional Policy, Corina Cretu, also attended the session to debate with CoR members. She gave her support to the idea of including new indicators, in addition to the indicator on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), when implementing cohesion policy.
She was asked several times by CoR members about her position regarding the use of instruments that could prove more accurate than GDP. The Commissioner said that she was in favour of instruments that provided a more accurate representation of the regions' diversity. She therefore highlighted the EUROPE 2020 index, which already exists and takes into account regional and urban dimensions, in an effort to measure the progress achieved with EUROPE 2020 Strategy targets. She also believes that they need to move in the direction of the OECD indicators on well being and include regional competitive indicators, as well as the Human Development Index (HDI) at regional and urban levels.
On the same day, CoR members adopted the “Regional Development Indicators - Beyond GDP” report introduced by Catiuscia Marini (PES, Italy), the president of the Italian region of Umbria. In this opinion, the CoR proposes the addition of indicators to measure climate change, efficient use of resources, quality of life and social inclusion. The Commission would therefore have a range of economic, environmental and social indicators that it could use, for example, as part of its impact studies initiatives. The report was welcomed by the Commissioner, who judged it particularly useful.
The urban agenda and simplification also occupied a large part of the Commissioner's speech and discussions. On the former, certain members regretted the sluggishness of the process, despite the strong commitment made by the Dutch Presidency of the Council of the EU (see other article), whilst others expressed concern about the dissociation between urban and rural areas. They expressed a preference for a “functional” approach between these two zones. On the latter, Cretu said she agreed and was against impenetrable lines being drawn up and said she was in favour of “functional zones”.
On the question of regulatory and administrative simplification, some members called for a single point of contact to help fund beneficiaries, whilst others opposed “gold plating”, a term used to describe how member states add rules in addition to those at a European level, which provoked a high level of heterogeneity and complicated cohesion policy implementation. Some CoR speakers also called for an approach based on administrative risk in the area of controls. On this issue, the Commissioner was more or less on the same wavelength and indicated that she was awaiting recommendations from the high level group on simplification at the end of February. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)