Tania Zgajewski More decentralisation On this alternative, we can afford to remain modest, since the approach is very modest itself. More decentralisation would basically imply two elements. All the single market aspects(and maybe some parts of the environment) are the responsibility of the EC and the rest is the responsibility of the member states. So telecommunications, energy, services and transport go to the EC. Social problems, most of the environment and structural reforms go to the member states. The strong advantage of this approach lies in its transparency. It then becomes very clear that the EU institutions are not responsible for the essentials of the programme of action. Inaction or bad results can thus not be considered as their responsibility. More integration It would of course be too ambitious to try to design a full alternative programme of action. There are nevertheless a few elements which seem relatively obvious. First, the EC legislative level must deal with the single market and the environment regulation(energy taxes, infrastructure charges). If we want to support sustainable development, we need to increase energy efficiency. In that perspective, measures should be taken to harmonise taxes for the use of energy resources and for the use of transport infrastructures. Here, there is a void in the present Lisbon Strategy. A rebalancing of taxes(and thus no global rise) would allow reducing financial charges on employment, and especially low qualified jobs. Second, there should be an EC macroeconomic level that increases the coordination of national economic policies and creates a stabilisation fund(at least for the euro zone). In the present situation, the EMU is unbalanced because we have a fully fledged European monetary policy and no correspondent European economic policy. This situation puts too much responsibility or pressure on the monetary instrument. Governments in the euro zone often say that they want to cooperate but, in practice, they do not and this lack of cooperation is costly(Aghion, Cohen and Pisani-Ferry, 2006). Macroeconomic interdependence is strong in the EU and still much stronger in the euro zone. We are dependent on a daily basis on what happens in the member states. That is why, for example, it would be much better if the budgetary policies on structural reforms were seriously coordinated, at least in the euro zone. 68