European charter for small enterprises
Questionnaire 2003
PURPOSE AND METHOD OF THE QUESTIONNAIRE
The European Charter for Small Enterprises is a policy framework which allows countries committed to the goals of this Charter to systematically pursue, evaluate and compare progress in achieving these goals in an annual, cyclical process.
The text of the Charter indicates that the open method of co-ordination will be used to structure this annual process.
This open method of co-ordination contains four distinct instruments for policy co-operation at European level: guidelines, the exchange of good practice, peer review and the use of indicators & benchmarks.
The 10 lines of action of the Charter can be considered the guidelines for the purpose of this exercise.
The national reports which EU Member States and candidate countries draft on an annual basis are the main input -documents to define how the other three tools of the open method of co-ordination can be usefully deployed to make and measure progress with the implementation of the Charter:
1. Reporting countries are asked to describe the state of the small business environment in their country – this will allow the identification of good practice through cross-comparison of the different reports. (Section 1 of the questionnaire)
2. Reporting countries are asked to rank the areas of the Charter according to different criteria, i.e. which areas they consider of most importance for their specific country, where they believe to be most/least successful, etc. By pinpointing the developmental needs and the strong points of countries, match-making of countries to allow the steady development of peer review mechanisms can gradually start to take shape (Section 2 of the questionnaire)
3. Finally, reporting countries will be encouraged to identify a small number of voluntary benchmarks in each report (Section 3 of the questionnaire).
The purpose of this questionnaire on the implementation of the European Charter for Small Enterprises is to assist those countries in drawing up this national, annual report and, in doing so, to feed into the open method of co-ordination.
The questionnaire is both retrospective and prospective: it inquires about progress made in the preceding 12 months, but also aims to map out the plans for the coming 12 months. The latter part will, in the following year, become a tool to measure progress made and to analyse causes for possible delays.
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