Institutions, Governance and Economic Growth in the EU: is there a role for the Lisbon Strategy

In order to ensure that the internal market delivers (growth, jobs) in the face of a changing market and technological environment (internal market liberalisation, globalisation, the knowledge-based economy) and to take advantage of the opportunities that it presents, the European Union (EU) needs to create an adequate institutional framework that promotes its efficiency potential and adaptive capacity. In the reality of European mixed economies, its capacity to solve the structural problems that impair productivity and economic growth in Europe hinges very much on governance, in particular when reforms to realise international synergies and complementarities or policy-learning with a view to common goals involve not only the EU but as well the Member State level. The Lisbon Agenda can be considered an exercise of policy coordination that needs to ensure that Member States’ over-regulated economies comply both with liberalisation in the Single Market and with an adequate European-wide institutional environment for sustainable growth without coordination mismatches, protectionism and market segmentation. This ultimately raises the question, central to this paper, of the adequate governance level and of the regulatory model to adopt (systems competition and/or European regulation).