ESU’s contribution to the Common EU surveillance of Member States’ budgets & coordination of economic policies (Economic Governance Review)

The European Students’ Union (ESU) welcomes the developments put forward by the Commission in the Economic Governance Review, while calling for more concrete actions to meet the challenges of the moment. ESU supports the analysis and policy positions formulated by the Lifelong Learning Platform, of which ESU is a member. 

ESU calls for more flexibility in the rules addressing the deficit, including a golden rule regarding education spending. As a general remark, we consider the outline of the framework  still very much based on the austerity part, despite relevant progress in ensuring that the framework is more adaptable to the social context. Clear evidence stemming from previous economic crises shows that education spending is one of the first categories which is affected by budget cuts. At the same time it cannot be emphasised enough that education plays a crucial role in the promotion of fundamental values and democratic citizenship as well as in innovative knowledge creation, being the basis of any knowledge based society. In this sense, the EU should create a social taxonomy which includes education spending, with a special fiscal treatment of such spending, through not counting in the education spending in the calculation of deficit for macroeconomic imbalance procedures. 

Furthermore, ESU strongly calls for the development of a long-term macroeconomic EU investment tool, similar to the Recovery and Resilience Facility, taking into account the lessons learned of the pitfalls of the Facility, especially in terms of stakeholder involvement. The ‘reforms’ element of the facility should have strong stakeholder support, in order not to repeat examples from RRF where member states used the facility as a means to promote unpopular reforms, with the potential threat of losing EU funds for the whole National Plan. This is not only detrimental to public policies, but also to the trust in the EU. 

We are disappointed by the weak developments in terms of enforcing the role of the European Semester. ESU believes that (higher) education should be a distinctive category in the European Semester, as such boosting the creation of a European Education Area. This would also turn the policy closer to practice, as several recommendations are linked to education, but through the lens of employment policy. Full-fledged policy coordination and support, including the links to investment tools, would benefit a lot from a stronger role of education in the European Semester.  

The Commission’s communication mentions that ‘Relevant stakeholders, in particular the social partners, shall be involved within the framework of the European Semester, on the main policy issues where appropriate, in accordance with the provisions of the TFEU and national legal and political arrangements’. ESU believes that stakeholders should be involved at all levels and in all policy issues. There are no policy issues where the participation of stakeholders is not appropriate.
As such, the European stakeholders should be involved in the EU-level analysis of policies, in formulating EU positions and in the criteria to be tackled through country-specific recommendations (CSRs), while the role of the national stakeholders should be more overarching, including information gathering for the formulation and monitoring of the country-specific recommendations (CSRs). The Commission should create stronger mechanisms for the national stakeholder to feed into this, and the policy toolbox at European level should also request more participation of stakeholders in the national implementation of the CSRs. In this regard, the Commission could replicate already existing practices, such as the Commission Delegated Act on the European code of conduct on partnership in the framework of the European Structural and Investment Funds. In this regard, the Commission could elaborate a binding framework for stakeholder participation, both in European Semester and in an macroeconomic investment tool (as RRF), through a delegated act.