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Small Business Act unveiled
27.06.2008, 11:11
An action plan to stimulate the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and encourage them to create more jobs - the Small Business Act (SBA)- was unveiled by the European Commission, on June 25th. Ten political principles to guide action for SMEs at national and European level are set out in the SBA, like thinking of SMEs first, encouraging entrepreneurship and ensuring easier access to funding. It also includes a number of flagship items of legislation like a draft regulation to create a statute for European private companies (SPE). Draft rules will be adopted next week to revise the rules granting SMEs block exemptions from EU state aid legislation and EU rules on reduced rate VAT for local or highly labour intensive services. Hoping to gain the backing of the European Council, the Commission also included an integrated follow-up mechanism for the revised Lisbon Strategy to ensure progress is made with the SBA measures. European competitiveness ministers will be discussing this at their meeting in Versailles, France, on Thursday 17 and Friday 18 July 2008.
EU Enterprise Commissioner Günter Verheugen said an attempt would be made to fill the gaps that have been identified in SME policy. He identified several areas where action at EU level would provide value-added, namely administrative simplification, state aid and measures to combat late payment of commercial transactions. On the latter point, the SBA announces a review in the spring of 2009 of Directive 2000/35/EC to increase pressure on bad payers. On SME access to public tender, Verheugen admitted that the idea of reserving public contracts for SMEs had been ruled out after studies showed that some small companies were very dynamic in this domain. The adoption of a voluntary code of conduct is being recommended instead in order to encourage public authorities to make their tender procedures more attractive to SMEs and to get them to provide greater information about contracts below the EU cut-off level.
Source: www.europa.eu