“The reality on the ground today is that our SMEs and entrepreneurs are suffering from excessive regulation and structural barriers that stifle their growth and innovation potential. Every year our SMEs lose tens of billions of euros in dealing with administrative and compliance costs of regulations at EU and national level,” said Alberto Cirio, Chair of the European Committee of the Regions (CoR) ECON Commission, during a workshop entitled “Improving Regulation and Support Services for SMEs: A Challenge for Regions and the EU”, held as part of the European Week of Cities and Regions.
Cirio referred to Mario Draghi’s report, which warns that “Europe is failing to match the speed of change” of its geopolitical rivals and that “inaction threatens not only our competitiveness but our sovereignty itself.” He added, “I think we all understand that Europe has no time to lose and needs to move faster with its entrepreneurial agenda.”
Cirio, who also serves as President of the Piedmont Region, referred to the visit of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to the Italian Tech Week in Piedmont, where she announced forthcoming ground-breaking initiatives to improve access to finance for scaling up, foster AI development, and introduce a new, simple, agile, and predictable legal framework for businesses across the EU.
Cirio underlined that the EU Single Market remains one of the greatest achievements of European integration — but now calls for urgent action. In this regard, he called for:
- Removing barriers preventing companies from investing across borders.
- Deepening Single Market integration, particularly in key sectors such as services and energy.
“The potential benefits of Single Market integration in these sectors are enormous,” he said. “It takes political courage, but inaction would be a huge loss of opportunity — for our businesses and our citizens.”
Cirio concluded that the CoR believes that regulatory simplification and administrative burden reduction can deliver the best results for SMEs when aligned across all levels of governance. “To demonstrate this,” he said, “we have invited our European Entrepreneurial Regions to testify how they support entrepreneurs and to share best practices on simplification challenges and opportunities at the local level.”