The EU Recovery Plan: bouncing back better together towards a green, digital and resilient Europe. What are the opportunities for Belgium?

With COVID-19, we are living an unprecedented crisis. While the crisis has hit every Member State, the budgetary firepower of Member States to respond to the crisis is not the same. An incomplete recovery in one Member State can reduce economic growth in countries that emerge faster out of the crisis and in Europe as a whole. Common EU action is needed to ensure that the single market — the bedrock of our European economy — is not unraveled.

The European Commission has proposed a massive €750 billion EU Recovery Plan, Next Generation EU. Through a €560 billion Recovery and Resilience Facility, Member States can request support for longer-term public investments and reforms, with a lasting impact on the European economy’s productivity and resilience, and the European Green Deal and the digital transition as a compass. This will enable Member States and the Union to recover in a coordinated and sustainable manner.

During this event, Veerle Nuyts and Xavier Vanden Bosch, European Semester Officers for Belgium whose task it is to build bridges between the European Commission and Belgian stakeholders, will be engaging with the audience on what opportunities the European Commission has identified for Belgium under this new recovery instrument. They will also explain the central role in this process of the European Semester, the EU socio-economic policies coordination framework.

About the speakers:

Veerle Nuyts works for the Representation of the European Commission in Belgium as European Semester Officer. Previously, she was a State aid case handler at DG Competition. She also served as a Référendaire at the European Court of First Instance. Prior to joining the European Commission, Veerle obtained a broad corporate experience, heading the strategy and regulation department at Bpost, the Belgian postal incumbent operator. She gained insights in a wide range of industry sectors while working in private practice for law firms Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in Brussels and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York. Veerle holds a Master of Laws from the Catholic University of Leuven (with Erasmus at the University of Zurich) and a Master of Laws from the University of Chicago, where she was a Belgian American Educational Foundation Fellow.

Xavier Vanden Bosch has worked for the Representation of the European Commission in Belgium as European Semester Officer since 2018. He previously worked in the Chief Economist team in DG Research and Innovation. Prior to joining the European Commission, he was Research Fellow in the European Affairs programme at Egmont – the Royal Institute for International Relations, where his work focused on the evolution of the Economic and Monetary Union and on the economic policies of the European Union. In his early professional life, Xavier notably worked as consultant for Accenture on projects for several major firms in Belgium. Xavier holds a Master in Business Engineering from the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management and a Master in European Economic studies from the College of Europe in Bruges.

Practical information:

• Language: Presentations will be in English; there will be no simultaneous translation.
• Participation fee: Free of charge
• Attendance: no certificates of attendance will be delivered
• Online registration: Click here
• Contact: CM – Belgian Financial Forum
• Email: financialforum@nbb.be