Lisbon strategy implementation

Abstract

In the 2000 Lisbon Council the heads of European Union countries stated as their goal the establishment of “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion” by 2010. To achieve this, it was intended that an array of economic and structural reforms called the Lisbon Strategy had to be implemented. At the time the macroeconomic backdrop to the proposals was particularly propitious with the world economy at a cyclical peak. After four years of poor economic performance, the euro area is now recovering on the back of a strong revival in the US and Asia. The recent assessment by the European Commission on the progress in achieving the Strategy’s goal is mixed: Denmark, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have achieved good results, while Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal have performed relatively poorly. In this study of ours, we try to understand the basic objectives of the Lisbon Strategy and how the EU nations have fared according to the indicators laid out in the Lisbon Strategy. We try to analyse the adoption of the strategy by the member nations and comment on the effectiveness of the Strategy. The study goes on further to suggest the future path for various countries in the endeavor to achieve the targets set out by the Strategy by 2010. There have been certain revealing findings regarding the performance of the various nations and these findings further corroborate the necessity of such a strategy in place for the European Union to emerge as the leading economy of the world. In order to perform this study successfully, we have developed the following steps: 1. A brief survey of the Lisbon strategy with an analysis of its objectives, structural Indicators and an overall evaluation of the Strategy 2. A country specific analysis has been carried out to understand the performance and the level of adaptation of the Strategy by the various countries 3. An analysis of the structural indicators against the general economic growth of the member nation of the European Union