The policy approach of the Administration of President Clinton and Vice President Gore is based on the belief that market-based economic systems provide the best environment for creating jobs, generating economic activity, and raising living standards, in our own country, in this Hemisphere and around the world. As we head into the 21 st century, prospects for strengthening the global economy continue to brighten. The shocks of a few years ago have subsided. Growth has resumed. The world community increasingly can concentrate on how best to promote sustainability and lock in the hard-won gains from those reforms already undertaken, rather than on the emergency measures needed to stem crises.
Significant challenges remain, however, and there is no room for complacency.
In particular, the United States cannot indefinitely provide the main stimulus to global growth, as it has in recent years. Sustained stronger domestic demand-led growth is needed in other industrial countries to support a more balanced world economy. Greater growth requires appropriate macroeconomic policies, but it also requires an optimistic vision of the possible and a determination to aim for higher goals. In Europe, the leaders of the EU recently held their Special Council in Lisbon. They set an ambitious target of raising EU growth to an average of 3 percent per year in this decade and creating 20 million new jobs.