Euro Plus Pact

The Euro-Plus Pact (or Euro+ Pact, also initially called the Competitiveness Pact or later the Pact for the Euro^[1]) was adopted in March 2011 under EU's Open Method of Coordination, as an intergovernmental agreement between all member states of the European Union (except Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Sweden and UK), in which concrete commitments were made to be working continuously within a new commonly agreed political general framework for the implementation of structural reforms intended to improve competitiveness, employment, financial stability and the fiscal strength of each country. The plan was advocated by the French and German governments as one of many needed political responses to strengthen the EMU in areas which the European sovereign-debt crisis had revealed as being too poorly constructed.

The pact was constructed as an attempt to incentivize increased implementation of structural reforms by each participating EU member state, to improve their performance within the four focus areas of the pact, through: (1) A regular bottom-up inter-governmental political dialogue (learning best practices from each other) and (2) A commitment for each state to include reform measures (freely chosen from a broad list of potential policy action responses) in their annual National Reform Programme for those of the areas found in critical need of improvement. It also featured a commitment to transpose and operationalize one of the Stability and Growth Pact fiscal rules directly into national legislation – to make it more effectively working, and a commitment to perform regular "structured dialogue" for enhanced tax policy coordination in EU.

In May 2015, the European Political Strategy Centre (in-house think tank of the European Commission) upon its analysis of the latest set of submitted National Reform Programmes, declared the pact was in a dormant state (not being actively used or referred to by the majority of participating states), and recommended it should be revived by moving it from its current intergovernmental state to become an integrated part of the European Semester in the EU framework law.^[2] In the latest approved plan for reforming the EMU, this recommendation was adopted with a target for its transposition to take place at the latest in June 2017.^[3]