Toespraak Eurocommissaris McCreevy over de interne markt voor ondernemingen in Litouwen (en)

SPEECH/08/118

Charlie McCREEVY

European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services

How the Internal Market Works for Business in Lithuania

Conference "Support for the Business Development in Europe - New Challenges for Lithuania"

Vilnius, 29 February 2008

Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great pleasure for me to be here with you in Vilnius on this, my first trip to Lithuania as European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services.

The organisations hosting this conference on the Enterprise Europe Network are all key business stakeholders in the Lithuanian economy, and that is why I am particularly grateful for the opportunity to come and speak with you.

Is the internal market working for Lithuania? I believe the emphatic answer to this question is YES. Since EU accession in early 2004, the gross domestic product of the Lithuanian economy per person has increased from less than 50% of the EU average to over 60% today. And things continue to go in the right direction.

The root cause of this lies in rates of economic growth which have regularly reached doubt-digit figures over the past four years. Many economies in the euro area can only dream of such levels of growth: in Lithuania it is the day-to-day reality.

Similarly, employment growth, which was in negative figures for much of the 1990s, has now taken off again. Labour productivity per person employed has climbed from just over 50% of the EU average before membership, to well over 60% in 2008. In fact, unemployment today is the second lowest in the EU, at only 3.2%. This is a phenomenal achievement, when you consider that over 16% of people were out of work in the early years of this decade.

While such a dramatic reduction is also linked to migration within the EU - and to Ireland and the UK in particular - this diaspora could well prove to be an excellent resource now that shortages of labour have been identified as one of the challenges facing the Lithuanian labour market. I can tell you that this was what happened with the Irish diaspora once economic growth took off in the 1990s.

Lithuania's headline figures relating to the government deficit and to public sector debt also remain healthy going into 2008. Of all the main economic indicators, it is in the field of fighting inflation. [1]

All of this being said, membership of the EU cannot on its own magically create growth and jobs - not in Lithuania and not in any other Member State. Likewise, as EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, I would be the first to say to you that the Single Market has probably not been the sole cause of the very encouraging Lithuanian economic development of the last 4-5 years. I would, however, have to say that the Single Market is amongst the most important causes of the turnaround.

This is because the Single Market provides a level playing field, and a bigger playing field than you ever had before. It also helps Lithuania to attract significant levels of foreign direct investment, which is then put at the service of growth and jobs in the economy.

As many of you probably know, we are now moving the Single Market programme to a further stage of its development, and I will talk more about this in a moment. However, in preparing for this Review, we carried out research on public opinion trends and views in the Member States. And when we got the results of these surveys, I was very pleased to see the really positive attitude of citizens and businesses in Lithuania to the benefits of the Single Market.

That is, on the benefits of free movement; on the benefits of open and integrated markets; and on the benefits of effective competition. This is how our Single Market is working for 500 million consumers in the EU as a whole: and this is also how the Single Market is working for business here in Lithuania.

So, what are the new objectives the Commission has set out for the Single Market in the years ahead? The basic goal of our blueprint of November 2007 is to put both small and medium sized enterprises and consumers at the centre of Single Market policy. Just as importantly, we wanted to send a positive and necessary message to citizens, who have sometimes felt left out of the Single Market story.

Here are some examples of what we will do for SMEs - a constituency to which many of you here belong. In the course of 2008, the Commission will introduce two major initiatives: a European Private Company Statute and a Small Business Act. Both initiatives should encourage SMEs to engage to a larger extent in cross-border business activities. Enterprises that could not benefit from the "Societas Europeae" Statute will now have a tailor-made legal form and will be able to carry out their business according to one set of corporate rules across the EU. As for the Small Business Act, it will bring together various SME-targeted measures, such as work on administrative burdens or SME participation in funding programmes.

In addition to these proposals, we have undertaken to work tirelessly for a Single Market of knowledge and innovation. This will be of particular interest to those of you from the Lithuanian Innovation Centre. The key initiatives we intend to progress are greater mobility for researchers, more industry friendly intellectual property rights, and more concrete steps towards creating an "e-Internal Market".

Those are some of the specific proposals we envisage. Alongside all of that, there is also another big change in the Commission; and this is a change in the methods we use and the mindsets we adopt when we think about the Single Market. In all our future work, we will be grounding our policy proposals in the very best available economic analysis of how specific markets are actually working. Thus, we will only seek to act where real problems exist, and where most benefits can be gained for consumers and companies. This means that we will only use legislation if it is really justified, and where there is no alternative. Otherwise, we will look for other less prescriptive ways to achieve our goals.

There is one further element of the Single Market Review I would like to mention today. And that is the need to communicate the Single Market better communicated and to make it more accessible to citizens and companies.

People need to know their Single Market rights. And the citizen's knowledge of those rights cannot always take this for granted.

For example, our really useful information and problem-solving network, called SOLVIT, is not yet as widely known - and used - across the 27 Member States as I would like it to be. I am really pleased therefore to see that the Kaunas Chamber of Commerce has a link to SOLVIT from its internet homepage.

Making the Single Market accessible to citizens and companies is certainly not a task we in the Commission can achieve on our own. The Single Market Review has therefore proposed that we strengthen our links, not only with the Member States, but also with all of our other stakeholders. These stakeholders include key actors in civil society such as companies, including SMEs, and it also includes consumer organisations, non-governmental organisations in the social sector, and trade unions. We would like to reach out to more of Europe's regions, who are becoming increasingly important in the implementation of Single Market rules.

Regarding these, and all the other headline ideas of the Single Market Review, I am very glad to say that in Brussels last week, the Lithuanian Minister for the Economy, Vytas Navickas, along with his colleagues from the other 26 Member States, welcomed the proposals we tabled in November 2007. They have now given us a mandate to go ahead and implement all these ideas. However, to succeed, we in the Commission are going to need the help of people like you to engage with us in this work.

Before I finish, I'd like to touch on one further subject. When we talk about whether the Single Market is working for Lithuania, there is of course another way of looking at the issue. That is: is Lithuania working for the Single Market? And I am glad to tell you that all the available data shows that it is - overwhelmingly. One of the main tools we use in the Commission to judge whether a Member State is living up to its legal obligations is what we call the Internal Market Scoreboard, which comes out twice a year.

The most recent Scoreboard was published on 14 February, just two weeks ago. It confirmed, once again, that Lithuania is right at the top of the class of the 27 Member States in terms of implementing the many Internal Market rules and regulations. [2] This shows that Lithuania is a place where EU law is respected and this also contributes to stable business environment and investment. And even more impressively, you are out on your own when it comes to implementing the rules properly. [3] For both of these reasons, Lithuania's status as a "shining light" in Europe's Single Market is richly deserved, and I warmly congratulate you.

So in conclusion, I believe we can thus say two things: the Internal Market really is working for business in Lithuania, and at the same time Lithuania is really working for the Single Market. With the Single Market Review, and also with the Enterprise Europe Network, we can bring our Single Market partnerships up to the next level.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attention. I now look forward to answering your questions, and I wish you every success with this conference.

[1] Eurostat figures, published on 16.1.2008, put Lithuania's annual HICP for December 2007 at 8.2%. This compares to a euro area average of 3.1%. January 2008 figures are due to be published on 29.2.2008.

[2] Lithuania's transposition deficit in IMS 16 bis, published on 14.2.2008, was 0.6% (Slovakia, Latvia and Denmark also recorded a 0.6% deficit). This refers to the state of play as at 10.11.2007.

[3] Open infringement cases as at 1.11.2007 show 18 files for Lithuania, the best of the EU-25. This compares with 55 for Poland, and 134 for Italy. (Only BG and RO, the two newest Member States, had fewer open proceedings).