Enrico Letta, former prime minister of Italy and author of the Report on the Single Market, attended the second day of the CoR's 165th plenary session as keynote speaker for the debate on 'A Place-based Approach to Competitiveness'. An advocate for the place-based approach, Mr. Letta stressed his support for a bottom-up model for reforming the single market that recognises and responds to local and regional strengths and needs. Moreover, he added that cohesion policy is crucial to ensuring sustainable and resilient competitiveness and should not be separated from market reform policies. Combining cohesion and competitiveness policies will crucially mitigate brain drain and ensure that research and innovation can flourish across Europe's member states and regions. Accordingly, Mr. Letta emphasised that 'freedom to stay' must be guaranteed to foster a European market that nurtures talents and opportunities.
Intervening in the debate, Tadeusz Truskolaski affirmed Mr. Letta's key points that Europe's competitiveness is built upwards from the local-level and that cohesion policy must therefore be significantly involved in boosting it. 'Bolstering Europe's economic competitiveness requires strengthening of its weakest links', posited Mr. Truskolaski, who called for increased support of peripheral and less-developed regions to ensure territorially balanced growth. By highlighting the specific needs of Europe's outermost and disadvantaged regions, Mr. Truskolaski underlined Mr. Letta's expressed need to reconcile territorial integration with economic growth by reforming competitiveness and cohesion policies in tandem. Ultimately, Mr. Truskolaski concluded that such an approach to fostering sustainable and resilient competitiveness will enable Europe to respond with strength and unity to emerging economic challenges.