Fostering the European Recovery through Industrial Clusters: state of play

Submitted by Veronika Muller on 02 September 2020

Summary of the European Alliance Against Coronavirus Daily Webinar on 1 September 2020.

In the first webinar in the September series, Ulla Engelmann, DG GROW, stated clearly that now the main goal is to answer the questions how industrial clusters can foster the recovery process, which are the different plan and mechanisms put in place, and how can clusters make use of the different instruments.

Going deeper into the economic outlook for this third quarter of 2020, Antonio Montañés from the University of Zaragoza presented predictions based on different confidence and sentiment indicators from the Business Surveys of Eurostat. Based on this sentiment indicators, the GDP annual growth for the EU is estimated to be -11.7%, making a 9.9% contraction in 2020 probable. However, the contraction does not affect European countries similarly, e.g. Spain and Italy are predicted to have sharper drops.

Antonio Novo, president of the European Clusters Alliance, presented the agenda for September. The idea is to go through the 14 ecosystems defined by the European Commission which are suffering from the crisis and share cluster examples on how the provided instruments are used.

Useful links:

European Commission: Summer 2020 Economic Forecast: A deeper recession with wider divergences

European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control: COVID-19 situation update for the EU/EEA and the UK

European Council: Special meeting of the European Council (17, 18, 19, 20 and 21 July 2020) – Conclusions

A recording of the session is available here.  

These are the presentations shown during the meeting: 

Antonio Montanes_Economic Perspectives.pdf 20200901 European Alliance Against Coronavirus - launching event v02.pdf

Find information and recordings of previous meetings on the Role of Clusters in Accelerating the European Recovery (since September 2020) here. For European Alliance Against Coronavirus webinar summaries of March - July 2020, please follow this link.

Finally, please find information on the upcoming agenda here.

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