On the 3rd of April INSME Secretary General Giovanni Zazzerini attended the Spring session of the OECD Working Party on SMEs and Entrepreneurship (WPSMEE) which was held digitally because of the Covid-19 emergency.
The meeting was the occasion to present the draft outline for the OECD 2021 SME and Entrepreneurship Outlook publication, but the core topic for discussion was related to the pandemic impact on SMEs, economies and the policies governments are implementing to face the economic crisis. It has been highlighted that SMEs more than large firms could go bankrupt while containment measures are in force. Moreover, small and medium companies register difficulties in adapting to new forms of production and work as well as to access updated information on possible ways to move forward and to governments’ initiatives to support them. Countries’ representatives shared the extraordinary measures governments are implementing and the ones they are working on to limit the impact of the crisis.
Finally, Martin Godel, Chair of the WPSMEE announced that – whether the current crisis will be overcome and there will be the conditions to come back to our ‘normal’ lives – the next WPSMEE meeting will take place in Switzerland in October 2020 and on that occasion INSME will gather its members for the 16th Annual Meeting whose theme will be “High-Growth SMEs and Sustainability”.
Source: The International Network for SMEs - INSME
