17 February 2003
Meeting the Challenge of Economic Reform in Europe
At a time of increased global uncertainty and in the context of EU enlargement, reform becomes all the more important. This is the key theme of ‘Meeting the Challenge: Economic Reform in Europe’.
The report reaffirms and underlines the UK Government’s strong commitment to the Lisbon agenda. Lisbon complements the core tenets of the UK’s domestic policy approach: that economic prosperity and social justice go hand-in-hand and that the best safeguard against poverty is a job.
The report accompanies and updates the 2002 Government’s White Paper: ‘Realising Europe’s Potential: Economic Reform in Europe’. It evaluates progress on economic reform in Europe, taking into account changes in policy and circumstances over the intervening year, and identifies priorities for action in the near and medium term.
Meeting the Challenge finds that while some progress has been made towards meeting the Lisbon Council objective of transforming the European economy into the most dynamic and competitive in the world, there is much more to do.
The key priorities for reform set out in the report include:
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policies to boost employment, skills and to make labour markets more flexible;
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promotion of well-regulated, dynamic and flexible markets;
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measures to promote research and development and tackle barriers to innovation;
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a more strategic approach to competition policy and genuine liberalisation across the single market in goods and services; and
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a modernised and streamlined state aids regime.
Structural Indicators of European Economic Reform: Measuring Europe’s Progress, February 2003
Meeting the Challenge is accompanied by ‘Structural Indicators of European Economic Reform: Measuring Europe’s Progress, February 2003’, which examines progress over a wide set of indicators.
Achieving the Lisbon goal requires economic reform based upon robust evidence and complemented by rigorous monitoring of outcomes. A comprehensive set of structural indicators has therefore been developed to help to identify best practice, to monitor progress against targets and to highlight strengths and weaknesses.
The documents below are available in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF). If you do not have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer you can download the software free of charge from the Adobe website.
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PDF file of European Economic Reform 2003 Report, sections 1 to 3 (353KB)
PDF file of European Economic Reform 2003 Report, section 4, 5 plus lists (209KB)
PDF file of Structural Indicators of European Economic Reform: Measuring Europe's Progress (440KB)
17/02/03 Pn 22/03 Press Notice: Meeting the Challenge of Economic Reform in Europe