Foreign minister: Central Europe ‘continent’s engine of growth’

The importance of central Europe has gradually increased in recent years and the region has become Europe’s engine of growth, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said in Tokyo on Friday.

Thec, Szijjártó told a seminar in central and eastern Europe at the Japan External Trade Organization (Jetro). But now several economic indicators show them in the lead, he added.

The economic growth of the Visegrád Group is more than double of the European average and the group is also strong in terms of its political cooperation, he added.

All four V4 countries fulfil important positions in the new European Commission, Szijjártó said. Commissioners from the Czech Republic and Slovakia are vice-presidents, the Polish commissioners oversees agriculture and the Hungarian is in charge of enlargement, he added.

V4 members together represent a market of 64 million people. If they were a single country, they would be the second largest EU member, he said. The unemployment rate and public debt in the V4 are much lower than the EU average, he added.

The “secret of success” in central Europe is that countries in the region pursue rational policies based on common sense, he said. In economic terms, this means that taxes in central Europe are the lowest within the EU, he added.

Another reason for success is that central European countries effectively maintain monetary and fiscal discipline, he said.

They have proven that it is possible to get rid of the old dogma according to which there is a binary choice between economic growth or fiscal discipline, he said, adding that Hungary had proved that both can be accomplished simultaneously, Szijjarto said.