Structural policies for growth and jobs.

Policy paper 174

This Policy paper by Henrik Enderlein and Jörg Haas analyses the role of the Eurogroup in European economic governance and suggests improvements.

| 01/12/2016

| Jean-Claude Juncker |

| Labour and social affairs

This Policy paper by Henrik Enderlein and Jörg Haas, director and research fellow in our office in Germany, the Jacques Delors Institut – Berlin, analyses the role of the Eurogroup in European economic governance. The main coordination framework in this area, the European Semester, is not yet working as intended. Some hopes rest on a stronger role of the Eurogroup. In 2014, it started holding “thematic discussions on growth and jobs”, i.e., on structural reforms.

The authors argue that the Eurogroup has to adapt in order to fulfil the additional tasks it has been assigned. They propose:

A stronger role for the President of the Eurozone;
Publishing evaluations of member states’ reform efforts;
A clear separation between informal and formal coordination;
Cooperation between the European Parliament and national parliaments in order to safeguard democratic control of European economic policy coordination.

This document was originally published in a paper provided at the request of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament and commissioned by the Directorate-General for Internal Policies of the Union and supervised by its Economic Governance Support Unit (EGOV).