Remarks by J. Dijsselbloem following the Eurogroup meeting of 9 September 2016

Highlights of the Eurogroup meeting, taking place on 9 September 2016 in Bratislava

09/09/2016

Highlights of the Eurogroup meeting, taking place on 9 September 2016 in Bratislava

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us here at the Eurogroup i press conference in Bratislava. I would like to take the opportunity to thank our Slovak hosts for the excellent organisation and the splendid venue where we are today. We welcomed to the Eurogroup Petteri Orpo, the newly appointed Finnish Minister of Finance. He was with us for the first time. We also welcomed Alenka Smerkolj who is the Acting Slovenian Minister of Finance.

So this was our first Eurogroup after the summer break, with many challenges ahead. Reading the newspapers which you (journalists) deliver to us, you sometimes feel that there is an atmosphere of doom and gloom over the eurozone. I would like to say that the economic recovery is progressing, growth has returned to almost all of our countries and becomes stronger year on year. Unemployement is going down in most countries so there are some very positive signes throughout the eurozone. Growth is keeping up with the US - that is also an interesting perspective to take - and the support of policies that we have in place: monetary policy, support for investments, structural reforms, improving the quality of public finances, on all of those areas we will continue to push the effectiveness of what we do and see what further steps are needed.

Today we discussed first of all the state of affairs in Greece. We took stock of the progress. There are number of milestones still pending to fully complete the first review and coupled with those are further disbursements. So we took stock of those and heard a little about the issues at stake. There was a general feeling that we must not lose time - the time scale that was drawn up and agreed in May 2016 - so more progress is needed and we strongly encouraged the Greek government as a whole to speed up the implementation of the remaining milestones. That of course could also help in ensuring a timely start and completion of the second review. The work on that will have to start very soon also. Against this background, we were happy to hear from our Greek colleague his commitment to do that work very quickly. We will be following that closely in the coming weeks.

We also discussed three fiscal issues:

First of all, we looked at the issue of early and late submissions of the draft budgetary plans. We have looked at this a couple of times in recent years and I am glad to announce that all Ministers are committed from now on to submitting draft budgetary plans in the window of 1-15 October. So let's not have anymore early submissions, let alone late submissions. The draft budgets plans need to come in within that timeframe, and that will also allow the Commission to synchronise the horizontal assessment of the draft budgetary plans that then follow.

The issue on what a caretaker governement should do in that period was also discussed -the general line of course being that they can submit a no-policy-change-budget. On these two elements, the guidelines, I believe it is the two-pack, will have to be adjusted and that work will now proceed and come back to us in Ecofin.

Secondly, we took stock of the Commission preparations and the dialogue with the European Parliament in relation to the partial freezing of structural funds commitments following the Spanish and Portuguese EDPs. The Commission informed us on the state of play there and I think we all agree that that the process needs to be completed as soon as possible. As you know the Spanish and Portuguese governments need to, on top of their draft budgetary plans, submit by the latest on 15 October a specific report on the effective action that they need to take. I am sure that Commissioner will say more about that.

Third, we were informed on the progress on the technical work on making the stability and growth pact simpler, more predictable and understandable for all of us - this is about the indicators needed to see whether countries comply with the act. This is the debate we had in Amsterdam during the informal Ecofin and Eurogroup. There is good progress and we should be ready to take some decisions on these budgetary indicators later this year. We will come back to that, probably in November 2016.

Finally, we held another discussion on the quality of public finances in our countries, we have discussed it before - today we focused on spending reviews, which is for ministers of finance a very useful and effective way to get a better insight into improvements on the effectiveness of public spending - to assess priorities, and to ensure that public money is spent wisely and effectively. So we exchanged information and experiences on this topic, and number of ministers informed us how they use the instrument and how it works, and we have designed a number of common principles on the use of this instrument of expenditure reviews. We will come back to that in the first half of 2017 and on a regular base after that.

Those were the key issues today. Let me give a floor to Commissioner Moscovici.