Employment Package A Critical Analysis Of The Measures Proposed And Their Implications On The Future Strategies And Economic Developments At Eu Level

On the 18th of April 2012, the European Commission has launched a document named Employment Package meant to deliver solutions for regaining the competitiveness lost on the labor markets at European level. The package contains a series of documents which are setting a new vision on how to regain competitiveness on the labor markets as well as linking the EU 2020 Strategy as well as the desiderate of Internal Market completion with the view to creating a new milestone for future developments at both EU and national level. The present article is trying to create a first x-ray of Employment Package’s content by observing the strong points and the weak ones in relation to the EU2020 Strategy, completion of the Internal Market and placing it into the current political state of play at EU level in its attempt for observing the future economic and social permutations which will incur if the document will be set entirely into practice. In the view of linking the content of the Employment Package with the ma in objectives and targets of the EU 2020 Strategy from the perspective of the European Social Market Economy, the article proposes to present a diagnosis of the latter concept. By this measure a new interpretation of the social component of the concept will be presented, so as to mark one of the main assumptions of this article that economic downturns did not occur just due to using wrong economic theories, but more due to a misuse of correct economic models. To this aim, the article will also analyze the implications of multi tier integration as opposed to federalization with respect to the EU architecture. Furthermore, the Employment Package is going to be analyzed mainly from the perspective of job creation and job destruction effects, induced increase of labor demand on specific sectors, full liberalization of the labor markets and their implications in real terms. The main questions to which the article is trying to answer is whether the detailed and ambitious set of measures that are contained by the Employment Package is actually going to reverberate into practice and to which end the objectives are going to create incentives for sound and self sustainable competitive markets. The last part of the article is going to sum up the findings on each section and draw the conclusions and build possible scenarios of action with respect to the Employment Package.