Dutch plan to liven up ‘thin’ Ecofin

Date: 13/02/1997

By Tim Jones

EUROPEAN finance ministers will gather in Brussels next week for a meeting that most of them did not want.

Faced with the thinnest of agendas for next Monday's (17 February) session, the Dutch presidency considered cancelling it. But the meeting was kept alive at the insistence of Belgium and the European Commission Officials remain concerned, however, that several leading ministers may decide not to turn up for a half-day gathering, since no substantive decisions are due to be made and there is so little to dicuss.

EU ambassadors considered abandoning the meeting when it became clear that the planned debate on Germany's 'convergence programme', showing how Bonn intends to achieve low inflation and tight budgetary control over the coming years, could not take place.

The programme was submitted to the Commission at the end of last year, but figures published in Germany since then mean that the plan is already out of date.

This narrowed the Ecofin agenda down to a discussion of the Belgian convergence programme and a preview by Economics Commissioner Yves-Thibault de Silguy of his staff's ideas regarding the forwarding of loans and grants to Georgia, Armenia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) to help them finance import payments.

To liven up the meeting, the Dutch government has proposed that ministers hold a general debate on recent economic developments, on the basis of a short note from the Commission.

But planned discussions on technical changes to the Solvency Ratio Directive and the Commission's plans for new energy taxes were taken off the agenda at the last minute, making a thin agenda positively anorexic and fuelling dismay that it had not been called off.