ensure price competitivity | guarantee a competitive edge vis-a-vis prices offered | ensure competitive prices | ensure price competitiveness

Subsequently, the impact on EU global competitiveness and future price and cost trends are considered.

Points out that although European electricity retail prices for small and medium-sized industrial and business customers and private consumers are relatively high in many Member States, investing in energy efficiency can boost the competitiveness of European businesses and reduce energy costs for private consumers; stresses, however, that the electricity bill in the EU consists on average of one third of indirect, state-induced tax and levies for private households, which when ...[+++] applied as fixed elements on bills, can make it difficult for consumers to feel the benefits from energy saving, and contributes to energy poverty; notes that levies to finance European climate and energy policies are the smallest part of the bill; and underlines that the high energy prices in the EU result in a difference in energy prices between EU Member States and our main competitors in large parts of the world, which inhibit the competitiveness of European energy-intensive industries; notes that innovation also increases with greater investment in energy efficiency, placing EU industry in a world-leading position.

For this purpose, it is essential to consider industrial policy in its wider sense, embracing those policies that have an impact on the cost, price and innovative competitiveness of industry and individual sectors, but also considering the competitiveness effects of all other policy initiatives which can have an important influence on the cost, price and innovative competitiveness.

23. Calls on the Member States to simplify the rules and reduce the administrative burden in order to make optimum use of the European financial instruments available for the current financial programming period, and to develop the competitiveness of the tourism sector and of tourist destinations; urges that, as part of the cohesion policy review and in light of the new Treaty competence for tourism, the role of tourism as a means of redressing the social, economic and territorial balance be upgraded; hopes that every form of funding that the EU provides for tourism will be ...[+++] tied to the provision of competitive services of an excellent standard and quality, and to sustainability; calls for the next financial perspectives and Structural Fund regulations to include among their priorities the rehabilitation of tourist areas that have fallen into decline in order to guarantee their competitiveness and sustainability;