The UK Chancellor, Gordon Brown, today published a paper entitled “Global Europe: full-employment Europe” – which sets out proposals calling for major reforms to enable Europe to grow faster and tackle unemployment in the face of rapid global economic change. 

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (R) meets with UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown in Beijing Feb. 21, 2005

The paper highlights major global economic changes including: the doubling of world trade every decade; a ten-fold rise in global capital flows to emerging markets since the 1970s; global FDI flows today five times the average in the first half of the 1980s; and rapid technological change.

As he and other European Finance Ministers prepare to visit China for the G20 meeting this weekend, the Chancellor particularly notes the rapid rise of Asian markets, which are accounting for a growing proportion of world trade, and that Europe is losing ground on its global competitors in growth, labour markets, skills, innovation and enterprise. 

In particular he calls for action in three areas:

(1) Boosting productivity and competition: speeding up the process of completing the Single Market in key sectors; opening up the market for services; eliminating untargeted and distortive state aids that prevent full and fair competition; implementing pro-active competition policies; and a sustained commitment to regulatory reform. 

(2) Skills and Employability: the development of modern social and labour market policies to help those without work find new jobs; childcare to help parents overcome barriers to work; reform of tax and benefits to make work pay; and national education and skills policies that equip people to adapt to change and work in new areas of comparative advantage.

(3) Openness: Europe to take a leading role in the forthcoming Hong Kong trade talks, and beyond, to reject protectionism and to press for the conclusion of an ambitious trade deal that will completely open markets to exports from developing countries.

The paper concludes:

“Rapid transformation of the global economy brings new pressures and new opportunities for Europe, to which we must respond in order to deliver both peace and prosperity for all our 450 million citizens in the future.

“Our task now and in the years to come is to equip Europe for the 21st Century through structural and budgetary reform, social reform, regulatory reform and trade reform - creating a Global Europe that becomes more competitive as the route to delivering full employment.”

The UK also published today its first National Reform Programme under the EU’s Lisbon economic reform strategy, setting out the challenges currently facing the UK economy, and detailing the Government’s economic reform plans to ensure macroeconomic stability, higher productivity growth and increased employment opportunity for all.

Download Global Europe: full-employment Europe and the UK’s National Reform Programme