Dutch to set agenda for new focus on industry

Date: 30/01/1997

EU INDUSTRY ministers face an agenda dominated by competitiveness and efficiency issues at their informal meeting this weekend.

The Dutch presidency will lead a debate about European competitiveness with a bench-marking report commissioned by the Netherlands itself on the information and communication technology sectors.

The report will warn that the EU is losing out to the US and Japan in these sectors, which are vitally important for the development of the information society.

It will also urge EU ministers to pinpoint firm action to improve the climate for firms such as electronics giant Philips.

Officials say ministers may well call for similar bench-marking studies in other sectors to be carried out at their 1-2 February meeting in The Hague.

They will also discuss the extent to which the EU's internal market has developed as an environment for pushing European companies to compete and consider what gaps should be filled following last year's Commission report on single market successes and failures.

The institution's first-ever report on the effectiveness of the single market showed it having a patchy effect, with sluggish competition in sectors such as insurance and large public contracts.

This means that businesses are often sheltered from EU and world-wide competition.

Competitiveness will continue to be the Dutch presidency's refrain in the months ahead, with consumer affairs ministers due to debate consumer policy and market forces, and plans for a joint conference on the quality of legislation and the internal market organised by the Dutch ministries for economic affairs and justice.

This weekend's informal meeting of ministers is also expected to launch a debate about the efficiency of Industry Council meetings themselves, amid concern that while important issues are discussed, agendas are often padded out with issues which could easily be dealt with elsewhere.

“The Dutch want to launch some navel-gazing about how the Industry Council works,” said a national official.

Discussion of a shake-up of EU state aid rules is likely to wait until the next formal meeting of industry ministers on 24 April.

By this time, the Commission is expected to have taken forward the broad debate launched by the Irish presidency in the second half of last year and arrived at a handful of proposals for changing existing procedures. These are likely to include removing some types of subsidies from Commission scrutiny altogether.