Most leaders of political groups in the European Parliament criticised member states’s determination to seek ever bigger cuts in the EU’s budget for 2014-2020 during a debate on 27 November to discuss EU budget negotiations.
Despite the commonly recognised urgent need for more infrastructure projects aiming at interconnecting transport, energy and telecommunication networks in the 27 EU member states, clumsy inter-institutional cooperation between the main EU bodies, namely the European Commission, The Parliament and the Council, threatens to deprive such projects from already available resources.
In this respect it was very interesting to watch last week the skirmishes between three Parliamentarian Committees over an urgently needed project called “Connecting Europe Facility.” “A centrally-managed EU funding from the “Connecting Europe Facility” (CEF) could boost investment in trans-European energy, telecoms and transport (TEN) networks and hence EU competitiveness”, said the three MEPs in their capacity of being co-rapporteurs in Tuesday’s 27 November joint debate over CEF in the Transport and Industry committees.
But ring-fencing some EU cohesion fund money for the CEF would undermine EU regional funding principles, objected other MEPs. Obviously until all those MEPs manage to find an easy way to promote the CEF project, Europe’s competitiveness would stagnate and thousands of unemployed workers will continue having a rough time.
More information can be found in a European Parliament’s press release in this address: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2fEP%2f%2fTEXT%2bIM-PRESS%2b20120917IPR51508%2b0%2bDOC%2bXML%2bV0%2f%2fEN&language=EN
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