In order to prepare the ground for the Green Paper on
entrepreneurship in Europe launched the same day, the Commission adopted a
package of documents outlining EU policy towards small and medium-sized
enterprises: - Thinking Small in an Enlarging Europe; - Report on the
Implementation of the European Charter for Small Enterprises; - Report on
the implementation of the European Charter for Small Enterprises in the
candidate countries to accession to the EU; - Creating an entrepreneurial
Europe: The activities of the European Union for small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs); - The SME Envoy: an active interface between the
Commission and the SME Community. This ‘SME package’ provided a snapshot
of recent progress in small business policy across Europe and pointed to possible future policy
actions. A key finding was that EU Member States and candidate countries
needed to focus on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) more often in
their policy and law-making: consultation of small businesses was still
too low in both these areas. Europe
therefore urgently needed to give small businesses the opportunity to
voice their views. However, the documents also stressed that substantial
progress had been made in key areas such as education for
entrepreneurship, exchange of good practices and simplification of
administrative procedures, both in candidate countries, which were facing
the challenge of building an entrepreneurial culture, and in Member
States. To help develop a more stable and creative enterprise sector in
candidate countries, the financial sector was encouraged to take a closer
look at SME lending as a source of opportunities, rather than just risks.
The Commission had recently taken several initiatives to support SMEs. In
this context, the recently appointed SME Envoy had a crucial role in
ensuring a more coordinated approach on SME issues. At Community level,
the Structural Funds were to spend some EUR 16 billion on
SME-targeted projects in the period 2000-2006. SMEs were also an important
target for the Sixth Framework Programme for RTD. For 2002-2006, nearly
EUR 2.2 billion had been allocated to support SMEs’ research and
innovation efforts.