European Entrepreneurship Conference

The Economist Impact conference on the future of European entrepreneurship

On 25 May 2024 an interesting event for European entrepreneurship took place. The highlight was the speech of former French Prime Minister Francois Hollande, who recalled that European productivity and the European economy are shrinking, and recognized the political impasse, i.e. the unclear common European policy.

He referred to the challenges, obstacles and dangers we face, while underlining that there is no danger of the Union breaking up for any reason.

Briefly, the main challenges are three:

1. Need for a "Defense Europe"

2. Need for clear European diplomacy

3. Need for a greener Europe and European coordination

The barriers:

1. The division in front of the Russia-Ukraine war and the difficulty in making decisions

2. Financial barriers, i.e. insufficient resources

3. The autonomy (of each member state) in decision-making to which each country clearly has the right being within the European Union was highlighted as a risk.

Afterwards, political officials of New Democracy, SYRIZA, PASOK and KKE were appointed with a common line of support for the Greek business in general, while there were some interesting discussions including the one about artificial intelligence, which according to the speaker Dimitris Tsigos is currently called more properly "regenerative".

The Deputy Director for Economy, Strategy and Policy, EBRD Juergen Siebel spoke about the way and the need to grow small and medium-sized enterprises, a topic that was further developed by the Minister of Development, Mr. Kostas Skrekas.

Also interesting were the speeches of the presidents of the Parisian and Greek-French chambers.