By Matteo Carlo Borsani
EESC Employers' Group

The first and foremost recommendation that the EESC gives in its opinion is to urgently take action to implement the recommendations of the Letta and the Draghi reports. In my view, this should be done in a comprehensive way; the two reports cannot be cherry-picked. They must be implemented as a whole, without limiting the proposals and attention to comfort zones, and without avoiding the most critical and divisive issues, such as investments. 

Starting from the Draghi Report, and given the obvious importance of his focus on EU competitiveness as a whole, I consider his recommendations on the EU industrial policy pivotal. In particular, his insistence on the need to adopt an industrial policy able to overcome the current fragmented approach. Today we have 27 national industrial policies that are not always coordinated. In this regard, only a structured European effort would allow us to ensure the right balance of tax, regulatory and trade/customs provisions and financial incentives that characterise the most recent industrial policies of the United States and China, with huge benefits for the single market.

This, however, should go hand in hand with a drastic reduction of bureaucratic burdens for businesses, for which I particularly appreciate Letta's call for 'a single market to go fast and go far'. Among his key recommendations, Letta advocates streamlining the bureaucratic burden, simplifying administrative procedures, and further actions to 'cut the red tape', especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In this context, in its opinion the EESC welcomes the Commission's proposal to reduce the reporting burden by 25% for all businesses and setting a target of at least 50% for SMEs. In addition, developing and elaborating on Letta's recommendation to consider a mechanism that will assist co-legislators with a dynamic impact assessment (DIA), the EESC strongly supports the idea of a competitiveness check to be carried out during the legislative iter.