The Committee on
Economic and Monetary Affairs adopted the report by Christoph KONRAD
(EPP-ED, DE), amending, under 1st reading of the codecision
procedure, the proposal for a decision of the European Parliament and of the
Council on a Programme for the Modernisation of European Enterprise and Trade
Statistics (MEETS).
The main
amendments are as follows:
- in order to
simplify statistical requirements and to reduce the response burden,
MEPs consider that regular reviews of priorities should be conducted in
close cooperation with Member States in order to identify areas and
characteristics which have lost priority and consequently can be deleted
from the legal requirements;
- in a
changing economic environment, MEPs stress that it is important to
define, in close cooperation with Member States, priority areas for
statistics like globalisation and entrepreneurship and to agree at a
Community level on a target set of indicators for each of the priority
areas. Those indicators need to be harmonised with international
statistics to the extent possible;
- according to
MEPs, the MEETS Programme shall start on 1 January 2009 (instead of 1
July 2008) and shall aim to:
- review
priorities and to develop target sets of indicators for new areas;
(objective 1);
- achieve a
streamlined framework of business related statistics; (objective 2);
- support the
implementation of a more efficient way of producing business and trade
statistics; (objective 3);
- modernise
the data collection system on trade in goods between Member States
(hereinafter referred to as Intrastat); (objective 4);
- by 31
December 2010 at the latest, and thereafter on an annual basis until
2013, the Commission shall submit to the European Parliament and the
Council a report on the implementation of the MEETS Programme.