Brussels, 17/10/2002 (Agence Europe) - On 16 October, the European Commission adopted its communication on the structural indicators in which it proposes a series of indicators to include in the Report to the Spring 2003 European Council. This communication presents new indicators, the last having been used in the Spring Report to the Barcelona Summit in March of this year. These indicators allow it to highlight sectors where the greatest political action is required and to determine progress made since the Lisbon Summit. All this should, of course, encourage Member states to push forward with their reforms in these fields.
As to the choice of indicators, the new list is not very different from the previous one, so as to guarantee a high degree of stability, which is important for defining progress achieved by Member states from one year to the next in moving towards the Lisbon objectives. This time, the greatest change made to the list of indicators concerns, as demanded by the Gothenburg Summit of June 2001, the fact that the 13 candidates will be included "step by step" in the annual comparison exercise, this year being the first one of these countries' inclusion process. Thus, any information on most indicators must be provided in time for the Spring Report 2003, at least for a majority of candidate countries.
The communication comprises an annex presenting the list of structural indicators proposed for the Spring Report 2003, which are: - general economic situation (productivity, employment growth, inflation rate, etc.); - employment (among other things, effective average exit age, gender pay gap, lifelong learning, unemployment rate); - innovation and research (among others, spending on human resources, research and development, level of Internet access, patents); - economic reform (market structure in the networking industries, sectoral and ad hoc State aid, public procurement, etc.); - social cohesion (notably risk of poverty, dispersion of regional employment rates, long-term unemployment); - environment (urban air quality, municipal waste, modal split of transport).