Brussels, 09/11/2000 (Agence Europe) - The European Commissioner responsible for business policy and the information society, Erkki Liikanen, and his Director General, Fabio Colasanti, presented the press on Thursday with the Commission's action to promote entrepreneurship and competitiveness. At the same time, the Commission published a series of documents analysing the situation and describing the plans and intentions.
Mr. Liikanen situated this action in the follow-up to the Lisbon Summit and in anticipation of Stockholm, next spring. The Lisbon plan is ambitious (the aim is no less than to create in Europe the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world), but it is up and running and progress is already tangible. That's already good, but much remains to be done. At present, the basic documents are on the whole available: table of the situation, analysis of best practices, action plan. All Member States are busy accelerating the creation of the information society, and the Commission is discussing with national administrations on the best way to proceed.
Mr. Liikanen does not share the view by which the Scandinavian countries are way ahead; it is true that for certain aspects they are ahead of the United States, but the situation is more complex; the elements to take into consideration are many, on the basis of the "indicators" chosen, and one may observe that for certain aspects one Member State is ahead, but others are ahead for another. The truth is that everyone has something to learn from the others; if the benchmarking system works, if everyone takes advantage of the best practice of their neighbour, the EU as a whole will catch up on the United States. The aim is not to hand out good points, but to analyse weaknesses and look to best practices.
For his part, Mr. Colasanti presented the "scoreboard", based on 31 indicators, which demonstrate the strong and weak points from several points of views: regulatory obstacles to the creation of SMEs, infrastructures available to companies, resource-availability (specialised labour and capital), presence of the Internet in companies and schools, level of spending into research, the number of patents per million of the population, etc.. No indicator is perfect, but by comparing them one can arrive at reliable results. The scoreboard will be further improved, but for now what is important is to exploit it in practice. This is what the Commission is busy doing, together with the national administrations of Member States.