MSMEs, Crafts and Family Business Category

The Micro, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (MSMEs), Crafts and Family Business Category is currently made up of Committee members belonging to the Employers' Group and the Civil Society Organisations' Group.

The category's secretariat is provided by the Employers' Group.

Priorities:

The Category's overarching goal is to monitor all aspects related to MSME policy, with particular emphasis on the specific needs of crafts and family businesses. We want to focus on these crucial economic and social agents.

Over the last decade, MSMEs have helped to sustain investments, while at the same time maintaining employment rates and overcoming, often with great difficulty, the financial constraints of a restricted credit market and unfair late payment practices.

Nevertheless, MSMEs remain the real backbone of the European economy. In recent years, they have been faced with new economic and industrial developments as well as with the severe effects of the COVID19 crisis and the war in Ukraine. Innovation and digitalisation, vocational skills and easier access to financial markets are needed. Overregulation and administrative burdens should be severely curtailed.