CoR members gathering at their plenary session in Brussels adopted today a resolution on the Annual Growth Survey (AGS) 2017, which points to the need to ensure a structured involvement of regional and local authorities in the European Semester (the yearly cycle of economic policy coordination within the European Union which sets out general economic priorities for the EU and provides Member States with policy guidance).
Ahead of the European Parliament's vote on its report on the European Semester 2017 (by Gunnar Hökmark (EPP/S)), the PES Group succeeded in anchoring a series of key requests in the text of the CoR resolution, that is:
- Stressing the importance of a European pillar of social rights, which would make a major contribution to the coordination and upward convergence of social standards and would strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the EU;
- Calling on the European Commission to put forward a proposal for a fiscal capacity for the Eurozone open to all Member States;
- Urging a stronger focus on the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals as one of the pillars of a European economic, social and environmental strategy after 2020;
- Requesting for a single strategic document coordinating all streams of EU-funded technical assistance for capacity-building, including the Structural Reform Support Programme;
- Inviting the European Commission and the Council to draft the country-specific recommendations in a way that allows fair and transparent measurement of progress in their implementation, also of structural reforms whose implementation may take much longer than one year;
- Last but not least, reiterating the CoR's request that investment made by regions and cities under the European structural and investment funds should be excluded from the Stability and Growth Pact calculations.
