Over the last five years 10 million new jobs have been created and there are now four million fewer unemployed in Europe. 6 million of the new jobs were taken up by women, thus closing the gender gap a little bit more. These are the results of a report of the European Employment Strategy (EES) initiated in 1997 by the Luxembourg Jobs Summit. Whilst the report also does not claim the success can be attributed to it 100%, Anna Diamantopoulou, the Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs, has stated that "the Member States co-ordinated labour market reforms have made a visible impact", much of the co-ordination to be attributed to the EES.

The last years have shown that the labour market responds quicker to economic and social changes than in previous economic cycles, reflecting greater flexibility in the EU labour market. The report goes on to states that employment-friendly tax and benefit systems have been put into place, education and training systems are being adapted to labour market needs, flexible working patterns with different contractual and working time arrangements have been promoted, initiatives to reduce the gender gap have been pushed and new life-long learning paradigms have been introduced. The EES seems to be on the right way.

Nevertheless, individual countries can still testify to more radical changes needed. Unemployment figures are not satisfactory in many of the EU countries, just to mention France, Germany, or Italy. In the latter there has been criticism of the EES for not taking structural issues of individual countries into account and thus failing to achieve real impact. Italian newspapers went on to say that if the EU should allow Member States enough room to manoeuvre, so they could decide on the adequate measures needed