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An Economists’ Manifesto on Unemployment in the European Union 223
cially with regard to the procedure to spend them, since in the future they could
become the main financial instrument of the European strategy to cure unemployment
and promote growth. Today these funds can be spent only if the state
using them provides simultaneously an equal amount of funds. This regulation is
wise, but an interval should be granted when there is a proper guarantee. Moreover,
to avoid delays, a particular care should be devoted to the organization of
the structures in charge of the projects.
In any case, some public support for job creation is perfectly justified. The
European Structural Funds were created for the purpose. Although important,
their grant nature leads to inefficient uses and quarrels between providers and
recipients. Therefore, there is little hope for a substantial increase of these funds
in the EU. We propose to augment the grant of the Structural Funds with loans
at interest rates at or below market rates. Such loans could be provided by the
European Investment Bank (EIB), which has the resources and the experience in
project evaluation to ensure that these funds finance sound and job-creating
investments. The EIB already received the mandate of the Amsterdam and
Luxembourg meetings to attach top priority to job creation. We argue that this
mandate should be scaled up. For such a programme, interest rates below market
rates are important otherwise the potential to stimulate investment and job creation
remains limited. In countries like Italy, in which it is particularly important
to keep at a low level the public deficit, recently achieved after a long and costly
effort, it would be advisable to partly finance the infrastructural investments
by also using a share of the receipts obtained from the privatization of public
enterprises.
However, the success of the operation requires a revision of the principle that
has emerged from the meetings in Amsterdam and Luxembourg, namely that the
solution of the unemployment problem is not a collective responsibility but a task
to be tackled by each country on its own. This approach is mistaken and will
make a prompt solution very unlike. It springs from the view that unemployment
is mainly due only to the malfunctioning of the labor market. But while we all
concur that labour relations greatly contribute to the problem, we also share the
view that demand plays a major role, relying on the evidence presented above as
well as other evidence and reasoning. But the agreements of the two recent
summits actually hamper the exercise of demand policy, because, after assigning
to the individual states the task of reducing unemployment, they deprive them of
all the classical tools of demand management: i) monetary policy, because individual
central banks have already little control over interest rates and will have,
gradually, even less; ii) fiscal policy, because of the rigid constraint on fiscal
deficit; and iii) exchange rate policy. And the European Union, besides being
exonerated of any responsibility, has no tools either: the Bruxelles Commission