The Lisbon Strategy

The Lisbon Strategy, or the Lisbon Agenda, or the Lisbon Process, was a development plan proposed by the EU. This strategy had plans that were proposed for the development of the economy of the European Union, between 2000 and 2010.

Its aim was to make the European Union the most dynamic and competitve knowledge based economy in the world, which could sustain its economic growth, with more and better jobs, and also greater social cohesion. Its goal was to achieve these objectives by 2010. This strategy was launched by the European Union in Lisbon, in the year 2000.

This strategy wanted to deal with the stagnation of economic growth and low productivity in the European Union. However, during the mid-term review in 2004, it was discovered that most of the goals in the strategy had not been achieved.

The EU used this report as the basis to refocus its agenda on the actions that promoted growth and jobs, with sustainable development as the main focus. Despite refocusing on the strategy, the closing review of the Lisbon Strategy has not yielded many positive results.

The Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt admitted in 2009, that the Lisbon Strategy had been a failure. The Spanish Prime Minister Mr. Zapatero said that a lesson had to be learnt out of the failure of this strategy. He also said that the lesson had to be remembered while launching the Europe 2020 strategy.

In this document, the Lisbon Strategy, the optimism at its launch, the reality check and its failure will be discussed. First, the Lisbon Strategy and its objectives will be described. Then, it will take a look at the mid-term review, and the way the European Union tried to refocus in order to recover. Finally, it will look at the closing review of this strategy.

Tags: Lisbon strategy; objectives; strategy review