Press Release: Council backs Commission’s 3-year blueprint to create more growth and jobs

The EU's ECOFIN Council adopted the European Commission's 3-year 'Integrated Guidelines Package' for 2005 to 2008 designed to spur growth and jobs in Europe. Recommending concrete priority actions it laid out a comprehensive strategy of macroeconomic, microeconomic and employment policies to redress Europe's weak growth performance and insufficient job creation. The new integrated guidelines put together the two central Treaty-based instruments for coordinating economic and employment policies, the broad economic policy guidelines and the employment guidelines. They were meant to bring a simpler, more focused and coherent EU economic governance by reducing the number of guidelines and by concentrating on core measures to create growth and jobs. The package was designed to give guidance for the 'national reform programmes' that Member States were to draw up by 15 October 2005.