Brussels, 04/03/2004 (Agence Europe) - Elizabeth Montfort (EPP-ED, France) and Paul Rübig (EPP-ED, Austria) will be addressing the European Spring Council of 25-26 March and make recommendations that developed at a hearing they organised with MEDEF (French employers) on the theme of "Innovative SMEs, levers for economic growth". According to a press statement, business leaders who took part in the hearing regretted that the single European market still did not exist for innovative SMEs, which remained confined to their national markets (and which are discriminated against on the increasingly globalised public procurement markets).
Monfort said that they should particularly encourage new companies to grow, and pointed out that 19 out of 25 of the largest US companies had been SMEs until recently, whereas European SMEs don't manage to take off. Rübig highlighted better access for SMEs to technology and noted that their spending on research and development remained 3-6 times lower that that for US SMEs. He said that same thing applied to access to capital.