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The core of the Lisbon strategy involves making the Member States of the European Union into dynamic and competitive, knowledge-based economies. The public interest is served by doing so, as a modern knowledge-based economy can offer present and future generations greater opportunities for prosperity, with a better quality of life for as many people as possible while respecting social and cultural values and the natural environment. This development model requires a clearly defined growth agenda based on a higher labour participation rate and sustained growth in labour productivity. The growth agenda can only succeed if all the parties involved (the Member States, the European Union, and the social partners) commit themselves to it. A modern knowledge-based economy must also be a competitive economy. At EU level, this will require a well-functioning internal market; at national level, it will require reforms and social innovation, for example with respect to the labour market. Such changes require a better-educated, better-trained labour force and measures that offer employees and citizens social protection. Cohesion between the economic and social dimensions of policy are vital if the European development model is to be viable.

The Social and Economic Council considers it important for self-employed persons to know whether or not they are covered under employee social insurance legislation when entering into a work relationship. Their status is not always clear, and that, according to the Council, is an impediment to the growth of the self-employed sector. The Council therefore supports the Dutch Cabinet's proposal to introduce a new version of the 'Statement of Work Relationship' (Verklaring Arbeidsrelatie) that will provide the self-employed with absolute clarity concerning their social insurance status in advance.

The Council makes a positive assessment of the draft Regulations and of the process by which they were drawn up, in which account was taken of the views of the various tiers of government involved in immigration policy, as well as those of the social partners and of other organizations active in the field of immigration. In particular the Council highlights the process of social dialogue that has taken place between the government and the most representative employers? organizations and trade unions at national level, which have for the first time negotiated and signed an agree-ment on the employment issues involved in the regulations, a circumstance of unques-tionable importance in the context of the Spanish labour market.The Council also notes that the approach of the draft Regulations is in full accordance in social and employment terms with that of the Council?s Report 2/2004 on Immigration and the labour market in Spain.The Council notes the importance of the social partners? involvement in the drawing up of the Regulations, and in particular the establishment of a stable framework for partici-pation in two basic areas:· Specification of needs on the labour market that should be met by migrant la-bour, i.e. in the devising of quotas and the catalogue of occupations in which jobs are hard to fill, with the help of the public employment services in the autonomous regions and of the social partners.· Monitoring and review of these instruments through the new Tripartite Em-ployment Committee, made up of the employers? organizations and the most representative trade unions, and the national Department of Immigration and Emigration.