Macro structural bottlenecks to growth in EU Member States

In a Communication on 3 March 2010, the European Commission outlined a proposal for a Europe-2020 Strategy to help the Union emerge from the crisis and to return growth and public finances to sustainable trajectories. In this context, the ECOFIN Council on 16 March 2010 agreed that 'there is a need to start identifying areas that constitute the main bottlenecks, including infrastructure, to growth at EU and national level and designing policies that will provide the right conditions for sustainable and balanced growth and jobs in the future'.

To this end, in May 2010 a specific Country Review exercise was carried out involving the Economic Policy Committee and the Economic and Financial Committee. The country review was based on Commission analysis of each Member State. This analysis encompasses both framework conditions for growth at macro level (fiscal, macro-financial and external imbalances) and growth drivers at macro level (labour utilisation, investment and productivity, and knowledge base).

This Occasional Paper publishes the Commission country fiches for all Member States. The paper also includes the concluding report of the EPC and EFC, 'EU macro-structural bottlenecks to growth at the national level', which summarises the identified bottlenecks. The findings of the report were endorsed by the ECOFIN on 8 June 2010.