He expects his five-year term in office to be judged on Europe's success in meeting the Lisbon agenda.
Reviewing progress over the 10 years of the Lisbon Agenda, the Centre for European Reform awarded top marks to the Netherlands.
Such reforms are being promoted by the commission under its Lisbon agenda, including its much-abused directive to liberalise trade in services.
It is premature to declare the Lisbon agenda a failure, since most of its elements will take several years to kick in.
This would help advance the Lisbon Agenda and foster the deeper economic integration necessary to make the euro zone a sustainable currency area.
Many European leaders are now even less likely than they were to pursue the Lisbon agenda or to implement economic reforms at home.
His country gave birth to the Lisbon agenda of 2000, an attempt to push forward the process of economic reform and liberalisation across Europe.
In that sense, the Lisbon agenda is sailing into unchartered waters.
While progress on implementing the liberalising Lisbon agenda has been slow and stumbling, its analysis of what ails Europe could have been written in London.
Since the original internal market programme delivered such relatively modest results, there is no particular reason to suppose that the Lisbon agenda will be any more effective.
The EU did have a competitiveness pact: the so-called Lisbon Agenda, which was launched in 2000, ran until last year, and was intended to raise the bloc's long-term growth potential.
The Lisbon Agenda had promise because it tried to compare EU members with other parts of the global economy, identify where they were weak, and where there were better ways of doing things.
The meeting failed to revive the so-called Lisbon agenda, a reform programme put forward five years ago with the object of making the EU the most competitive economy in the world by 2010.
The so-called Lisbon Agenda called on EU governments to implement a range of economic and social changes, including tax cuts, reform of heath care and pension systems, and making it easier for companies to hire and fire workers.
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