Faced with accelerated population decline in some regions of the EU, the European Commission has armed itself with a “Talent Booster Mechanism”. Presented in its communication ‘Harnessing talent in Europe’s regions’ published on Tuesday 17 January, this mechanism aims to help the regions concerned to train, retain and attract qualified workers.
82 regions particularly affected
The initiative is also accompanied by an update of the report on the impact of demographic change. In the EU, “between 2015 and 2020, the working age population has decreased by 3.5 million persons. We can expect a further decline of an additional 35 million persons by 2050”, commented Dubravka Šuica, the Commissioner for Demography.
While these trends affect the whole of the EU, 82 regions in 16 Member States are particularly affected. 46 of them, representing 16% of the population, combine a rapidly declining working-age population with a low proportion of graduates and are thus in a “talent development trap”. The other 36 regions, representing 13% of the population, risk ending up in the same trap.
A mechanism to attract talent
In view of this and drawing lessons from the 8th Cohesion Report, the Commission has proposed a mechanism to retain and attract young talent. It is divided into eight pillars.
The first are the launches, in 2023, of a pilot project to support regions suffering from the “talent development trap” to develop strategies to attract and retain workers, and a new initiative on the “smart adaptation of regions to demographic transition” to stimulate investment in talent development in these regions.
In parallel, the Technical Support Instrument (TSI) will help Member States make the reforms needed to tackle the decline in the working-age population, while cohesion policy and interregional investment in innovation will boost opportunities for skilled jobs.
In terms of information exchange, the Commission plans to publish relevant European initiatives on a dedicated webpage and to set up measures for the exchange of best practice between regions.
Finally, the institution intends to improve its knowledge in order to eventually propose evidence-based policies, particularly in the areas of regional development and migration.
Elisa Ferreira, Commissioner for Cohesion Policy, also called on Member States to “give political visibility to this problem” and to mobilise funding from the 2021-2027 Cohesion Policy and the Resilience and Recovery Plans. This is all the more true because “often it’s in those areas that are [...] losing population and dynamism, that we end up with anti-democratic sentiment, because people feel that the world is not offering them anything”, she concluded.
To read the paper: https://aeur.eu/f/4xk
And the report: https://aeur.eu/f/4xl (Original version in French by Hélène Seynaeve)