Brussels: Europe and the Arabs

This morning, the European ministerial meetings at the level of finance and economy ministers continued, which began yesterday, Monday, at the level of ministers of the member states of the euro area and expanded today to include all member states of the European Union. At the beginning of the meeting, the Polish rotating presidency of the unified bloc presented its work program for the first semester of the year in the field of economic and financial affairs.
The ministers had the opportunity to participate in a political discussion on ensuring a globally competitive business environment in Europe through simplification, eliminating chaos and reducing the regulatory burden. The ministers were invited to provide input to the Commission on its planned proposal for a "comprehensive regulation" aimed at simplifying and reducing the regulatory burden on companies.
The ministers exchanged views on the state of the economic and financial impact of the Russian aggression on Ukraine, based on an update from the Commission. The Council will adopt recommendations on medium-term financial and structural plans in the context of implementing the economic governance framework. The Council is also expected to adopt recommendations for member states currently subject to excessive deficit procedures to take effective measures to correct their deficit within a specified time frame.
In order to advance the work on the 2025 European Chapter, the Commission presented the 2025 Alert Mechanism Report and the Council’s draft recommendation on economic policy for the euro area. This will be followed by an exchange of views. Ministers will assess the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility. The Council is expected to adopt implementing decisions approving the revised Recovery and Resilience Plans, submitted by some Member States. The Presidency will provide an update on legislative proposals in the area of ​​financial services.

At the end of Monday’s discussions, Eurogroup President Pascal Donohoe said: “Today was the first Eurogroup meeting of the new year. We started with a strategic discussion on the main economic policy priorities for the euro area for the coming year. The Commission presented its view on where we should focus over the next five years, and ministers engaged in a broad exchange of views covering issues such as competitiveness, fiscal policy and global development.

Our discussions today will feed into the Eurogroup’s coordination work, which will begin with the preparation of our next work programme, which will be on the agenda of our next meeting. Everyone around the table is fully aware of the historic juncture we are at, but we also made it clear to each other that our work will continue, and we must play to our strengths in deepening the foundations of the euro and increasing our coordination and cooperation with each other.

We focused today on creating the conditions for stronger economic growth, for resilience in the euro area, and for the specific decisions to be taken in 2025, in order to strengthen the euro.

We then moved on to a discussion on innovation in wholesale payments. We looked at options for modernising the settlement of wholesale transactions in central bank money. We have looked at the needs of the market, which is evolving very rapidly in response to rapidly changing technology through solutions such as distributed ledger technology and tokenization.

The ECB has shared with us some encouraging results from the ongoing exploratory work it is leading on the use of new technologies such as distributed ledger technologies for their role in central bank money settlement in collaboration with the private sector. We have all noted that these technologies have the potential to enhance the speed, efficiency and transparency of financial markets, reduce barriers to entry and may ultimately serve as a driver of capital market integration in Europe.

We then moved from the end of the sentence to the end of the retail with the digital euro. Since our last discussion on this topic, the ECB has continued to work on technical preparations. Discussions and discussions between the participating legislators – the Council and the European Parliament – ​​on the proposed legal framework are also progressing. We have again acknowledged that payment behaviour is changing rapidly and that the decline in cash use is continuing. A range of different mobile payment solutions are now gaining momentum. In the absence of a digital euro, consumer adoption of international payment methods continues to rise. The longer we remain on the sidelines, the harder it will be for us to catch up. The changing political context and the high ambitions of the major players in the tech world underscore what is at stake. These issues are increasingly in sharp focus for ministers around the Eurogroup table. That is why we continue to evaluate this project.