This week, the European Council - Europe’s heads of state and government met in Brussels. Apart from the Fiscal Pact, employment policy impulses and in particular the necessity to tackle youth unemployment were also on the agenda. Herman van Rompuy, President of the European Council, put it in a nutshell, when he said that Europe had to help young women and men to find a job in the labour market. This needed solid investments, commented van Rompuy. However, in time of crisis and record unemployment in Europe, in particular investments are more than difficult to realise.

The European Parliament has rushed through its decision to stop plans of the European Commission to allow misleading food labelling. It was only at the start of the week, that the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety voted against statements on food packages, such as “only contains 5 % fat” and similar. Only a few days later, this vote was confirmed in the Plenum.

This week, a public hearing on the planned new rules for credit rating agencies took place in the European Parliament. Whilst the agencies are free to put their thumbs up and down as they please and in the process plunge already ailing countries even deeper into the abyss, some MEPs were surprisingly lenient towards them.

The attempts to solve the so-called “government debt crisis“ continue to be the focus of the debate between the political factions. This is the conclusion for the public hearing on evaluating the instruments to deal with the government debt crisis, which took place in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament on Monday and Tuesday.

Just in time for the mid-term arrival of the legislative period in the European Parliament, there are a number of new appointments to be made in the Parliamentary committees. Apart from the election of Martin Schulz (Socialists & Democrats) as new President of the European Parliament, there are also significant changes from an Austrian point of view.

This week, the EU Commission launched a public consultation on corporate restructuring and its social consequences. The aim is to identify successful practices and strategies in the field of restructuring and the adoption to change, so that lessons can be learned from the economic crisis. The results of the Consultation will also be integrated into the planned and revived flexicurity agenda.

Interference in the freedom of the media, threatening the independence of justice and the National Bank, and worrying developments concerning the minority rights in Hungary are only some of the issues that triggered an unusually heated discussion in the European Parliament this week.

That high-quality statistics are indispensable for political decisions has been clearly demonstrated since the start of the financial crisis in 2008. In its new annual report, the European Statistical Governance Advisory Board (ESGAB) urges national governments to play their part in strengthening the credibility of official statistics.

The European Commission recently published a new package of measures for the air transport sector. Apart from reducing capacity bottlenecks at European airports and introducing new regulations on aircraft noise, it is also planned to improve quality and efficiency of ground handling services. This sector is notably very labour-intensive and employs about 60,000 people in Europe.

Just two years after the Pittsburgh Declaration of the G20 States to fully regulate the financial markets and to get rid of the shadow banking system, the European Commission presented with some delay new proposals on the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive on 20 October 2011. Now the struggle for the substance of the MiFID will begin in the European Parliament and the Council. It remains to be seen what will be salvaged in respect of protecting investors.