17/04/2007 (Agence Europe) - The 4th European conference “Challenges and opportunities for craft and small enterprises” closed in Stuttgart on Tuesday with the adoption of recommendations to achieve a competitive craft and small enterprise sector. These recommendations seek to ensure that future-oriented skills (mutual recognition of qualifications in vocational education, mobility of young people, multilingualism etc) are available within craft and small enterprises, that they can use all the opportunities offered by changes in the world (for example, unlocking the potential of the internal market, promoting micro-credit etc) and that they can take advantage of ad hoc conditions and the necessary support to improve the business environment. These recommendations will be presented to European, national and regional authorities and to the business sector itself. The Commission will use them in forthcoming policy initiatives. The conference was also the occasion for the Commission to launch its new portal for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which pools all information on EU action of interest to SMEs: http: //ec.europa.eu/enterprise/smes/index_en.htm (ol)