Ahead of the Eurogroup meeting in Dublin, Greece’s Minister of National Economy and Finance and Eurogroup President Kyriakos Pierrakakis delivered a dual message: vigilance in the face of immediate risks and threats, and urgency in implementing the reforms Europe so critically needs.
More specifically, Mr. Pierrakakis made the following statement:
“It is a great pleasure to be in Dublin today for the Eurogroup and ECOFIN meetings, in the homeland of my predecessor, Paschal Donohoe, whose contribution to the Eurogroup has been particularly significant. I would like to begin by paying special tribute to that contribution.
Today we have two items on the Eurogroup agenda.
The first is to assess recent economic developments. We are seeing pressures in energy markets as well as on prices. We will discuss the impact of these pressures on our economies, our households and our businesses, the measures we are taking to mitigate that impact, and how we can further coordinate our actions.
The second item on the agenda is productivity. We are now two years on from the publication of the Draghi report and, to a significant extent, we have yet to move from diagnosis to implementation. There is a productivity gap between Europe and the United States.
We need to close that gap if Europe is to fully realise its potential. It is precisely in this context that we have invited the OECD Secretary-General, Mathias Cormann, to join the Eurogroup today, so that we can discuss the OECD’s proposals for Europe with the aim of improving its productivity performance.
Overall, if you asked me to describe Europe’s economic performance over recent months and years in a single word, the word I would use is resilience. And it goes without saying that resilience is of existential importance. After all, I come from a country that was forced to learn this the hard way. I would add, however, that resilience is not in itself a growth strategy. It is a necessary condition for Europe to fully unlock its economic potential, but it is not a sufficient one.
Therefore, our message here today is twofold: vigilance in the face of immediate risks and threats, and speed in implementing all the reforms that Europe so urgently needs to carry out,” Mr. Pierrakakis stressed.
ANA-MPA
