Commission takes further steps to foster the openness, strength and resilience of Europe’s economic and financial system

The European Commission today presented a new strategy to stimulate the openness, strength and resilience of the EU’s economic and financial system for the years to come. This strategy aims to better enable Europe to play a leading role in global economic governance, while protecting the EU from unfair and abusive practices. This goes hand in hand with the EU’s commitment to a more resilient and open global economy, well-functioning international financial markets and the rules-based multilateral system.

This proposed approach is based on three mutually reinforcing pillars:

1. Promoting a stronger international role of the euro by reaching out to third-country partners to promote its use, supporting the development of euro‑denominated instruments and benchmarks and fostering its status as an international reference currency in the energy and commodities sectors, including for nascent energy carriers such as hydrogen.
2. Further developing EU financial market infrastructures and improving their resilience, including towards the extraterritorial application of sanctions by third countries. The Commission, in cooperation with the ECB and the European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs), will engage with financial-market infrastructure companies to carry out a thorough analysis of their vulnerabilities as regards the unlawful extraterritorial application of unilateral measures by third countries and take action to address such vulnerabilities.
3. Further promoting the uniform implementation and enforcement of the EU’s own sanctions. This year, the Commission will develop a database – the Sanctions Information Exchange Repository – to ensure effective reporting and exchange of information between Member States and the Commission on the implementation and enforcement of sanctions.

Today’s strategy builds on the 2018 Communication on the International Role of the Euro, which had a strong focus on strengthening and deepening the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). A resilient economic and monetary union is at the heart of a stable currency. The strategy also acknowledges the unprecedented recovery plan ‘Next Generation EU’ that the EU adopted to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and to help Europe’s economies recover and embrace the green and digital transformations.

More information

European Commission