Businesses are key to future prosperity of the EU

At the beginning of March, BusinessEurope, the umbrella organization of confederations of industries from the whole of the EU, celebrated its 60th anniversary.

At this celebratory occasion, BusinessEurope adopted its statement of values, summarizing the core principles of entrepreneurs in the EU. The statement recognizes the crucial role of businesses for a thriving economy and society, as they create new jobs, economic growth and investment. Furthermore, businesses focus on creating new skills and help to adapt workers and students to modern challenges in a timely manner, helping to keep the European social market economy alive even through difficult economic periods.

The aim of European businesses is to offer customers fine goods and services, invest in innovation and create new technologies and thus constantly increase the competitiveness of the EU, provide quality jobs and develop new talents, and also limit the environmental footprint of companies. However, to turn these values into reality, businesses also need a stable and predictable legal framework in the EU. Therefore, European and Czech businesses call on all stakeholders to create and implement a sound industrial policy that would encourage implementation of these values.

The industrial policy needs to be long-term focused and has to set clearly defined goals and indicators that would help to monitor their implementation. The share of industry on the European GDP has been in decline in recent years and such a strategy would help to invert this negative trend. The competitiveness of European businesses these days depends greatly on their ability to innovate and come up with new solutions and technologies. Therefore, European and Czech businesses support the idea of increasing the budget for research and innovation in the next Multiannual Financial Framework post 2020. Industrial and key enabling technology-focused projects have the highest potential to add to the creation of new products and services with high added-value and thus strengthen the position of the EU as the top place in the world to do business.