In a Competitiveness Council programme examined by EUROPE on 8 January, the Bulgarian Presidency clearly demonstrates its determination to push forward with what it is calling “common industrial policy” (CIP). It is also hoping to make progress with the "services" package.
According to the Bulgarian Presidency document, the CIP aims to facilitate synergies between EU instruments and guarantee sustainable growth, employment and access to financing for enterprise, whilst stimulating innovation. To this end, the Bulgarian Presidency is continuing work on the European Commission’s communication on industrial policy presented last September, following the state of the union address by the President of the Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker (see EUROPE 11861).
In this regard, the Bulgarian Presidency would like to define precise objectives for the short and long-term and would like, above all, to ensure the adoption of the common industrial policy strategy that particularly takes into account SMEs. The Presidency has not provided any more precisions on what these objectives could be but did indicate that they would need to meet global challenges, by taking advantage of the single market and drawing from digital technologies. The Bulgarian Presidency indicated that it wanted to present conclusions in this regard for the Competitiveness Council on 12 and 13 March.
It should be recalled that the European Commission communication of 13 September proved to be a little bit of a let-down, particularly among the member states, which hurriedly called on the European Commission to present an holistic long-term strategy up to 2030 (see EUROPE 11916, 11910).
The Bulgarian Presidency also wants to make progress on the raft of measures on services (see EUROPE 11700). On this point, the Presidency would like to make “maximum progress" on the draft regulation for a single digital portal that aims to provide citizens and companies with useful online information. At the end of November, the Council adopted a general approach on this dossier (see EUROPE 11916). No clear mention has been made with regard to the electronic services card, however, and this appears to be in the doldrums at both the Council (see EUROPE 11910) and European Parliament (see EUROPE 11933).
The Presidency would also like to advance at a working group level on the raft of measures in the company law domain, which is planned for the second fortnight in February and which is very likely to be on 21 February 2017. It should be recalled that the objectives pursued are to guarantee the digitalisation of company activities throughout their life cycles and to simplify transnational mergers.
On the question of technical harmonisation, the Presidency would like to make progress on drawing up rules for EC labelled fertilisers and the regulation on vehicle safety. The European Commission is due to present a raft of measures in the first quarter of 2018 (see EUROPE 11870). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)