Improving Europe's capacity to innovate and be globally competitive requires further efforts to encourage disruptive ideas and foster their commercial up-take. These are some of the conclusions to be drawn from the latest ranking of innovation performance across Europe. The European Commission's Innovation Union Scoreboard 2015 reveals that the EU’s overall level of innovation has remained stable. However, the crisis has left an impact on the private sector's innovative activity: the number of innovative firms is in decline, as are...

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The Internet and digital technologies are transforming our world – in every walk of life and in every line of business. Europe must embrace the digital revolution and open up digital opportunities for people and businesses. How? By using the power of the EU's Single Market. Today, the European Commission unveiled its detailed plans to create a Digital Single Market, thereby delivering on one of its top priorities. At present, barriers online mean citizens miss out on goods and services:...

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Brussels, 05 May 2015 -- Economic growth in the European Union is benefitting from positive economic tailwinds. According to the European Commission's Spring 2015 Economic Forecast, these short-term factors are boosting an otherwise mild cyclical upswing in the EU. Europe’s economies are benefitting from many supporting factors at once. Oil prices remain relatively low, global growth is steady, the euro has continued to depreciate, and economic policies in the EU are supportive. On the monetary side, quantitative easing by the European...

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-- Loans will support trade and investment of SMEs in Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the European Investment Bank (EIB) announced the creation of two facilities that will finance the international expansion of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) from Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. EIB President Werner Hoyer and IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno signed a document in Cologne to formalize the agreement. Financing for the IDB’s Internationalization of SMEs Financing Facility will...

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Strasbourg, 28 April 2015 -- Today the European Commission set out a European Agenda on Security for the period 2015-2020 to support Member States' cooperation in tackling security threats and step up our common efforts in the fight against terrorism, organised crime and cybercrime. The Agenda sets out the concrete tools and measures which will be used in this joint work to ensure security and tackle these three most pressing threats more effectively. The recent terrorist attacks on Europe's people...

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Speech by Vítor Constâncio, Vice-President of the ECB, at the joint conference organised by the European Commission and the European Central Bank “European Financial Integration and Stability”, 27 April 2015 Ladies and Gentlemen, The financial and sovereign crises have markedly changed our understanding of financial interactions in the Economic and Monetary Union. We have experienced how quickly apparent integration among Member States can unravel and how it can pose a threat to economic activity, job creation and price stability. The degree of...

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Financial integration in the euro area has improved steadily and has reached a level close to that before the sovereign debt crisis Establishment of Banking Union and unconventional monetary policy actions taken by the ECB are major drivers of the improvement Financial integration is crucial for restoring efficient credit flows to the real economy Overall, financial integration in Europe has returned to a level close to that recorded before the sovereign debt crisis, the European Central Bank (ECB) said today in a...

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