Hello and welcome to the second series of ETIP podcast, Voices from the World of Work.

I am Bianca Luna Fabris, communications officer at the ETII, and I am the host for this season.

In this episode, I will be joined by Sotiria Theodoroopul.

Sotiria has been working at the ETII since 2010, and she is head of the European Economic Employment and Social Policies Unit.

Today we will be focusing mainly on the economic policy priorities set by the European Union and the overall economic developments of 2020.

If you don't mind Sotira, let's start from the most recent event.

What is the autumn package that has just been released by the European Commission?

The autumn package is a set of documents, hence the term package. And every year,

its launch, sometime in November, marks the beginning of next year's European semester.

The European semester itself is the framework of coordination in a form of an annual cycle

of member states' economic policies.

So national economic policy plans are submitted by the member states, the European Commission, and they are discussed

and recommendations are issued by the Commission and later on approved by the Council of Ministers.

So to kick-start this European semester, the European Commission, every autumn, publishes this

set of documents which outline the economic policy priorities

which are meant to guide member states in shaping their fiscal and other economic policies.

And these documents normally include the annual Sustainable Growth Survey, the draft joint

employment report. It's still a draft because it has to be approved later on by the Council.

There is the alert mechanism report which monitors macroeconomic imbalances and it is a result of the reform of the economic governance framework in the previous decade.

There is a policy recommendation for the euro area,

a set of policy recommendations for the euro area, and the single market performance reform,

as well as the positions of the European social partners on the annual Sustainable and Growth Survey.

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