Contribution of
the Information Society Forum to the
European Summit on Employment in Luxembourg

Barcelona  declaration

November 1997

“Final text of the Information Society Forum Group under the chairmanship of Mr. Majo”

The Information Society is a society in formation.  Only the first signs of this future knowledge-based society are evident, and yet they already raise great concern about its impacts.  In the current European context of high unemployment, whose unacceptable level may put in jeopardy the very organisation of European societies, legitimate fears arise: to what extent and how can the information society contribute to job creation in Europe?

The Information Society Forum has been working on this issue for two years.  The representatives of  social and economic groups have taken part in exchanges of information, analyses and debates organised in the framework of this Forum.  This declaration of Barcelona expresses the intellectual consensus built up through this consultation.

1.The relationships between technology, productivity, growth and employment are complex.  Any simplistic approach to the problem is dangerous.     Globalisation, new business strategies, and the relation between technology, productivity and employment are at the heart of economic growth and the improvement of living standards.  Their complexity precludes any simplistic approach to the problem.  Technological innovation and diffusion is a process of “creative destruction”.  It does involve job destruction through sectorial shifts from industry to services, changes in skills profiles, and new division of labour between industrialised and developing countries.  But at the same time, it leads to job creation in new emerging activities, and, above all, in the whole economy, because technical progress has proven to be a major engine of economic growth and increase in real income, and is even more so to-day with globalisation.

2.The promotion of the Information Society could be and has to be a key pillar of  European employment policy.     According to the best available knowledge and state-of-the-art economic analysis, empirical evidence points to the potential positive impact of the emergence of the Information Society on employment in the medium term.  The group is convinced that the promotion of the Information Society could be and has to be a key pillar of European employment policy. 

3.The challenge is to develop the necessary conditions to fully exploit the job potentialities of Information Society.       The challenge for Europe consists of building up the best conditions to fully exploit the job potentialities of the Information Society.  Urgent actions are required to raise the awareness of current and future managers, to improve the business environment that will allow companies to develop and create jobs through the best usage of the new technologies, and stimulate the required changes in the work conditions and skills.  The social partners should act, be involved and commit themselves.  Government should favor their involvement.  Because of the global nature of the Information Society, international dimension should be taken into account.

4.The modalities of growth in coming years should be different as different economic conditions are present. Among these new modalities and mechanisms:

Economic growth as observed in past decades was too aggressive to the environment, causing resource depletion, environmental destruction and extreme energy consumption.  Future growth will be conditioned by the capabilities of European economies to better balance a hard, manufacturing and material-intensive economy and a soft, information-rich service economy based on human capital. 

The export of products towards developing countries will less and less compensate for lack of domestic demand, for the products consumed by the developing countries will be manufactured on the spot with our exported technology, know-how, and capital. 

The general decrease in working time experienced by  Western economies will give way to the development of part-time employment, which better fits the need of companies for flexibility and the desire of individuals for free time.

5.Growth alone will not solve Europe’s unemployment problems.  Productivity will probably increase at a rate very close to the increasing rate of output, leaving no room for important new employment.  In addition, it is estimated that some 8-9 million European citizens are discouraged from seeking a job because of the level of unemployment.  Any growth upturn is likely to first increase the rate of participation and only partially affect the unemployment rate.  Growth is indeed a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.  Structural adaptations already underway have to be deepened and enlarged, and growth will smooth its social and economic costs.

6.In this context, the development of the Information Society is at the root of sustainable growth.  It will reinforce intangible investment as a factor of competitiveness; it will accelerate the shift from physical consumption to the usage of information, from products to dematerialised services, from investment in productive capital to investment in human capital, and from transport to teleworking or teleconferencing.  It will cause the development of a totally new marketplace: electronic commerce.  Consequently, the substitution of labour by capital, whose excess has been so detrimental to European employment over the last decades, will slow down, if not reverse.  The Information Society will contribute to more labour-intensive growth in Europe which is not harmful to the environment.

7.Market forces alone will not solve Europe’s delay in entering the Information Society nor eliminate unemployment      All the mechanisms at work are far from being clearly understood.  Further studies are required.  However, the group is convinced that market forces alone will not solve the Europe’s delay in entering the Information Society, nor eliminate unemployment. 

8.Public authorities have a key role to play in this domain.     The public authorities at all levels - European, national, regional, and local - have a key and urgent role to play in this domain in order to speed up the transition.  The adaptation of the regulatory and legal framework has indeed to be achieved, but structural reforms have also to be implemented.  Barriers to entry, conditions to start-up, impediments to innovation, and shortage of specific skills are particularly detrimental in this domain because the Information Society is just emerging and, as any new phenomenon, is more sensitive to factors impeding new business initiatives and innovation. 

9.Budgetary resources exist at all levels for new active employment measures related to preparing people and organisations for the Information Society.      Currently public resources are used in a wrong way.  The 200.000 million ECU spent by Member-States on their labour market policies, as well as the Community funds at their disposal, offer enough budgetary resources for active measures: installing computers at school and enabling everyone to become IT-literate, multiplying the resources to teach and train specific high-tech skills, promoting best practices and diffusing them, speeding up the uptake of teleworking and other new forms of productive organisation, giving incentives to investment in new multimedia services and applications, developing pan-European venture capital and secondary capital markets to finance start-ups in multimedia, content and information services sectors. 

10.The Luxembourg Summit should establish lines of action for European as well as national policies in this domain.     The Forum urges European authorities as well as national governments to consider such measures as priorities of European employment policy, and expects clear lines of action from the next European summit in Luxembourg in that direction.

11.  The Information Society Forum is ready, at the request of the Luxembourg Summit, to provide further insight into the contribution of Information Society to more-labour intensive growth in Europe.

November 3