During the EC's meeting on the economic agenda, Kahanec stressed a need for brave EU leadership:

"Europe is in a trap of fiscal, monetary, trade, demographic, and regional imbalances. An innovation deficit hinders economic growth.

Strong or improving employment/participation indicators provide a delusive picture of the true state of European labor markets. Rather than indicating healthy employment prospects, they are largely driven by aging, low fertility, inadequate education, and ineffective migration policy and the resulting shortage of qualified labor force able to fill in new jobs and replace the workers that leave the labor market.

The underlying cause is of structural rather than cyclical nature. And there are new challenges (and opportunities) for European economies such as autonomous production systems and decarbonization.

Therefore, the adequate policy response to these challenges is less that of stabilization; rather, we need deep structural economic reforms and innovative, and sometimes entirely new labor and social policies to effectively respond to these challenges and provide for sustainable, fair and inclusive prosperity in Europe.

We critically need brave European leadership to accomplish this."