Commissioner Liikanen calls for the removal of red tape for European SMEs
In an address to the international small business congress, EU Commissioner for Enterprise and the Information Society, Erkki Liikanen, has said that Europe's entrepreneurs still face too much bureaucracy. Speaking at the event in Amsterdam on 28 October, the Commissioner discussed the barriers that still exist for small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) trying to operate in and across Europe, and outlined measures aimed at removing such obstacles. On the issue of registering and starting up a new business in Europe, Mr Liikanen said: 'There are inefficiencies in the registration process in a number of Member States, and the time and capital requirements remain complex [...]. One further major issue is the time required to start up a new business; it is substantially greater then the time to 'register' the business. In other words, bureaucracy still stifles SMEs.' According to the Commissioner, the 'single access points' and statutory response times that a number of Member States have introduced have reduced the scale and complexity of the paperwork involved, but he implied that more needed to be done. The speech also identified other areas where better practices and simpler regulation could boost small businesses and their effect on the European economy. The promotion of entrepreneurship will be the subject of a forthcoming Commission green paper, and will analyse specifically why so few people in Europe want to become entrepreneurs, and why so few small companies are willing to grow. Mr Liikanen touched on the simpler legislation for the internal market initiative, through which the Commission hopes to simplify the regulatory framework for SMEs. Schemes to assist enterprises to benchmark their performance and help them understand the supply chain relationships of cross-border economies would, he said, 'put some flesh on the bones' of a new framework of support. Such initiatives, along with the cooperation of Member States and the active participation of businesses, would, said Mr Liikanen: 'make a strong contribution to addressing some of the various shortcomings still marring SMEs