Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-30-Speech-4-060"
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"en.20061130.6.4-060"2
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".
Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, there are two more things I should like to say.
The first is that, however much one might wish to go along with the criticism of the conditions – and the Commission, as you know, does not hold back when criticism is merited – there is one thing that should not be overlooked, and that is that Europe’s economic statistics show an upward trend. Growth this year has surpassed expectations by far; a fall in unemployment is making itself very definitely felt; European firms are producing more, and we are becoming very much aware that the Member States’ priorities are changing as they become keener to improve the conditions for entrepreneurship.
Secondly, when compared with – for example – the United States, it is indeed the case that there are fewer people in Europe who are prepared to set up a business themselves or to run one, or – to put it in the way a Member did a moment ago – to take upon themselves the risk of using their own money to create jobs for others. The causes underlying this are very interesting, and are to be found in our culture. It is for that reason too that the Commission has been such an energetic advocate of coupling together entrepreneurship and education; as early as at school and university, it must be possible to guide young people towards entrepreneurial activity. Remarkable successes are making themselves visible in the countries in which this is being done, while, in those where it is not, there are quite simply too few enterprises, and the plain and simple fact is that no jobs will be created in the absence of a business to create them.
What we are currently learning – and it is a matter of considerable interest – is that ‘learning by doing’ is still the best way to go about it. Reference has already been made in this debate to the ‘Enterprise Experience’ project, which I started with the aim of getting all the senior civil servants from my own offices to work in a small or medium-sized enterprise for at least a week. The first fifty to do so have now got back, and the results are fascinating. Every one of them – and yes, I really do mean every one of them – has come back with important proposals for improvements, for ways in which we can make life easier for small and medium-sized businesses, and these deserve to be the subject of serious discussion. On the other hand, though, the firms that took our official on and enabled these to work for them say that they learned a great deal from it and now have a far better idea of what is feasible at the European level and of what is not.
I really do want to encourage the Member States to take similar initiatives. Businesses change so quickly that it is absolutely necessary that those who create the conditions under which they operate should have a real knowledge, derived from their own observations, of what actually goes on in them and of what effect what they do has on them."@en1
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