Authors Iain Begg | Gabriel Glöckler | Anke Hassel ... - The Europaeum

Towards a less dogmatic approach
What lessons can be drawn for the future of the EU’s economic reform
agenda? A general lesson is that the identification of a clear “socioeconomic
frame”, such as flexicurity, appears to be more conducive to
policy coordination than anodyne references to enhancing innovation.
An excessively broad and comprehensive approach to issues of economic
reform at the EU level may be difficult to disagree with, but it can also be too
vague to translate it into policy action. Instead, EU policymakers should
strive to identify further “socio-economic frames”, perhaps with similar
features to flexicurity. These features include: (1) a recognised degree of
success; (2) a clear foundation in the traditions of the European Social
Model; (3) the adaptability to different models of European capitalism.
We think that, prima facie, three broad sub-fields of European political
economy could be subject to the same procedure of inclusive debate and
scrutiny that was applied to flexicurity: entrepreneurship; health care;
and the environment. Exporting the method adopted to flexicurity to
other fields could help to flesh out the EU’s reform agenda in substantial
terms.
A central theme of this chapter is that the EU should enhance the
economic credibility of its reform agenda by striving for more pointed
and analytically-robust reform recommendations. There have already
been some positive developments in this regard. In December 2005,
the Commission launched LABREF, an annually-updated database of
labour-market reforms. In 2007, the EU-KLEMS database was presented,
including a wealth of information on growth and productivity at the
industry level. Commission officials have also worked with their national
counterparts on the Lisbon Methodology (LIME) working group to
develop more economically robust methods for measuring structuralreform
progress. 29
We think that these efforts should be intensified with a view to identifying
different reforms patterns and exploring the effectiveness of individual
reforms more thoroughly both post-hoc empirical verification, and exante
plausibility tests. Against the backdrop of the VoC approach, we
can identify two broad areas for further work for improving European
innovation patterns. First, more knowledge is required regarding the
functioning of institutional interactions both at the sub-national level,
and at the level of recently acceded member states. Recent research has
shown that some of the EU’s newest member states are showing patterns
of CMEs, of LMEs, as well as less clear ones. 30 Anecdotal evidence, such
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After the crisis: A new socio-economic Settlement for the EU