The COVID. 19 crisis has hit the transport sector exceptionally hard. Despite operational and financial constraints, the sector has maintained crucial connections both for the transport of people and of essential goods. This has been possible mainly thanks to the employees who have continued working under difficult and uncertain conditions. The strategic role played by rail during the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted that achieving the Single European Rail Area is necessary both for facilitating the supply of essential goods such as food, medicines and fuels, particularly in exceptional circumstances, and for reaching wider transport policy objectives.
The COVID. 19 pandemic is a major shock to the global and Union economy with a major social and economic impact across Member States and regions. Due to the necessary containment measures, economic activity in the EU dropped significantly. The contraction in EU GDP in 2020 is expected to be around 7. ▌%, far deeper than during the financial crisis in 2009. ▌ Investment activity is expected to have dropped significantly. Vulnerabilities such as the over-reliance on non-diversified external supply sources and a lack of critical infrastructure need to be addressed, in particular for SMEs, including micro-enterprises, for instance by diversifying and strenghtening strategic value chains, to improve the Union’s emergency response as well as the resilience of the entire economy, while maintaining its openness to competition and trade in line with its rules. Even before the pandemic, while a recovery in investment-to-GDP ratios in the Union could be observed, it remained below what might be expected in a strong recovery and was insufficient to compensate for years of underinvestment following the 2009 crisis. More importantly, the current investment levels and forecasts do not cover the Union’s needs for structural investment to restart and sustain long-term growth in the face of technological change and global competitiveness, including for innovation, skills, infrastructure, small and medium- sized enterprises (SMEs) and the need to address key societal challenges such as sustainability or population ageing. Consequently, in order to achieve the Union's policy objectives and to support a swift, sustainable, inclusive, lasting, and healthy economic recovery, support is necessary to address market failures and sub-optimal investment situations and to reduce the investment gap in targeted sectors.
The COVID. 19 crisis has also highlighted the importance of reforms and investments in health, and economic, social and institutional resilience, including with a view of increasing crisis reaction capacity and crisis preparedness in particular through improving business and public service continuity, and the accessibility and capacity of health and care systems, of improving the effectiveness of public administration and national systems, including minimising administrative burden, and of improving the effectiveness of judicial systems as well as fraud prevention and anti-money laundering supervision.
The COVID. 19 pandemic has shown that threats to public health can require uniform rules concerning travel restrictions for travel into the European Union by third country nationals. The adoption of inconsistent and divergent measures at the external borders to address such threats negatively affects the functioning of the entire Schengen area, reduces predictability for third-country travellers and people- to-people contacts with third countries. To prepare the Schengen area for future challenges of a scale comparable to the Covid-19 pandemic, a new mechanism should be established which would allow for a timely adoption and lifting of coordinated measures at Union level. The new procedure at the external border should be applied to a large-scale public health emergency with a serious cross- border threat to health, recognised by the Commission at Union level without prejudice to Regulation (EU) 2022/23712, taking into account information from competent national authorities.
The COVID. 19 pandemic demonstrated the need for a Union wide mechanism that would apply to situations where, within the Schengen area, a large scale public health emergency is affecting several Member States at the same time, putting at risk the well-functioning of the Schengen area. The ▌new Schengen area safeguarding mechanism should permit coordinated solutions to protect the interests of persons entitled to benefit from the area without controls at internal borders, by maximising the effectiveness of the measures taken while minimising their negative side-effects.
