Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/783519
maltatoday, WEDNESDAY, 8 FEBRUARY 2017 11 Business Today www.creditinfo.com.mt info@creditinfo.com.mt Tel: 2131 2344 Your Local Partner for Credit Risk Management Solutions Supporting you all the way Sant: National parliaments should ask for simpler fi scal compact rules Labour MEP and former prime minister Alfred Sant has called for the Maltese parliament to discuss and assess the real impact of the EU's fi scal compact, and seek a simplifi ciation of the pact's spend- ing rules. "The fiscal pact has not solved long term problems of the eurozone and should be submitted for a new and democratic discussion before it becomes part of the Treaties of the European Union. All local and national representatives across the EU should be invited to carry out an assessment of the real impact of the fiscal compact," Sant told MPs from all over the EU during a discussion on the pact. The Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union, also referred to as TSCG or more plainly the Fiscal Stability Treaty is an intergovernmental treaty introduced as a new stricter version of the Stability and Growth Pact, signed in 2012 by all EU members except the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom and Croatia. In particular, a national budget has to be in balance or surplus under the treaty's definition. Sant said MPs should analyse the compatibility of the goals set out in the Fiscal Compact with other criteria adopted by the EU to boost public investments across the EU, for instance, by exempting net public investment from government deficit calculation. "Before deciding to include the fiscal compact in the EU treaties, and regardless of such a step, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions. With our national parliaments, we must create a discussion, a dialogue, about the real significance of the results obtained, the results claimed, for the fiscal compact. Have its rules really been instrumental in saving the eurozone? Are they still relevant today in their existing format?" Sant asked. The Maltese MEP remarked that the latest autumn forecast of the Commission showed many countries still lagging in terms of debt, deficit and unemployment. "The truth is that it's not possible to put fiscal policy in a legal straitjacket. Tight rules will be violated as soon as they become too inconvenient. The political environment now is very different to what it was when the fiscal compact was crafted. Today, perhaps because of it, the main democratic challenge to austerity is coming from populism, which has thereby been boosted. Instead of trying to follow blindly the goal of fiscal consolidation, I think a debate should take place around the fiscal compact." MEP Alfred Sant said many countries are still lagging in terms of debt, defi cit and unemployment EU hopes to revive trade talks with Trump Talks between the EU and the US on a free trade deal could be re- vived, European Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen said on Monday. The two sides failed to conclude negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) before former President Barack Obama left office last month. Now, the EU hopes to revive talks under Obama's successor Donald Trump. "TTIP has not been mentioned by the new US-administration," Katainen said at a business conference in Berlin. "So we still expect that it will be possible to re- launch discussions and to create a sustainable business environment." During the election campaign Trump said he would bin the beleaguered deal and just a few hours into his presidency TTIP was no longer featured on the White House website. The EU hoped to remove trade barriers between the bloc and Washington. Obama and Angela Merkel both pushed for the deal, with the German Chancellor saying the agreement was "absolutely in Europe's interests". But Trump, a critic of multilateral trade deals, has also already announced plans to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership on his first day in office. One of the first decisions Trump made when he entered the Oval Office was to declare the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal between 12 countries, as defunct. This raised fears among EU leaders that the US President could also scrap TTIP. Trump's administration has said they are more interested in forming bilateral agreements after TPP was ripped to shreds. The deal was controversial because many campaigners described it as a template for how multinational businesses wish to erode national regulations in favour of a more unfettered market access. European Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen