Brussels, 08/02/2006 (Agence Europe) - At a press conference at the European Parliament in Brussels last week, Pasquale Pistorio, Vice-President of Confindustria presented a document entitled “Italy seen from Europe - Towards the Lisbon goals: Italy's results”, in which Italian employers, as they said in a press release, “voluntarily emphasise the weaknesses of the Italian system in order to (…) encourage (…) awareness on the part of the players, public and private, of the urgent need to act”. On a general level, the document laments the fact that in 2005 Italy's position, based on the economic indicators used by the European Commission in its annual report on meeting the Lisbon targets, did not improve from 2004. On the basis of these indicators, Italy is still in a group of countries whose results were insufficient and made only little progress, ahead of Greece, Hungary and Malta but behind Spain, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Cyprus (according to the report, the best results were from Sweden, Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Austria, while the major economies of Germany, France and the United Kingdom were in a middle position). On the positive side, there was a drop in unemployment levels (7.7%, compared with an EU average of 8.7%); Confindustria, however, is worried by other data: investment in research and development (1.14% of GNP compared with an EU average of 1.92%), number of patents (74.7 per million inhabitants, more than in Spain and Poland but lower that the EU average of 133.6 and 311.5 in Sweden, 310.9 in Finland and 301 in Germany), cost of financial services (from 1996, increase of more than 82%, compared with 17% in France and 27% in Germany and a drop of 23% in the United Kingdom).