Sector-specific industrial policies supporting greater strategic autonomy

The EESC:

• believes that any further decline in the metallurgical industry is unacceptable, as it risks seriously undermining the EU’s strategic autonomy, all of its industrial sectors (the rail, nuclear, maritime, space, automotive, defence industries, etc.) and, consequently, the future of EU industry. Now more than ever, Europe needs to establish an Industrial Deal to back up its Green Deal and its Circular Economy Action Plan; it needs to consolidate industrial alliances in the metal industry through ‘important projects of common European interest’, and to reindustrialise many abandoned regions in order to restore high-quality, locally based jobs.
• calls on the European Commission, as a matter of urgency, to resume sector-specific industrial policy analyses and prospect assessments through foresight exercises, with the aim of regaining competitive positions at global level.
• calls on the European Commission to implement targeted measures swiftly to support the various strategic sectors: chemicals and its derivatives, metallurgy and cybersecurity.
• believes that companies need access to banking institutions that support an industrial policy that is rooted in European regions, to ever more highly skilled workers, and to academic centres that promote innovation and research to create the jobs of the future.
• stresses the need to increase partnerships to stimulate innovation and investment, to relocate the chemicals industry and locate decision-making centres on European soil, to standardise quality standards for sorted/pre-treated plastic waste, and to establish a single and open secondary market so as to provide a continuous supply of plastic waste for use in operating chemical recycling plants.

recommends that heightened, continuous supervision be put in place, and that preventive technical assistance programmes be developed that are accessible to all companies.