“The government and the majority need clarity on the country’s industrial policies”
In the late afternoon of Monday 14 March, a large delegation of the ANIS Board of Directors was received by a limited representation of the Government and no official representative of the majority following the request sent a few months ago for a discussion on interventions for economic development and, specifically, on the industrial policies that the Executive and the majority intend to promote today and in the future. In this regard, ANIS explained and motivated in depth the need of entrepreneurs to be able to rely, as a prerequisite for development, on clear rules, legal certainty and rapid response times. Issues subject to reform proposals that can no longer be postponed, a step that completes the list of things done as soon as possible, in which at the moment we highlight electronic invoicing and an important first towards simplifying hiring. On industrial policies, on the contrary, a clear position was requested on what are the development trajectories of the sector we represent, since, as a sector already represented in recent months, during this legislature various measures and decisions have been adopted which objectively – and, it seems, deliberately – they penalize businesses and in some cases even oppose them. In particular, those of the industrial sector, which instead is the one that has repeatedly demonstrated – and even more so in the last demonstration period – to be a backbone of the country’s economy. The numbers are there to prove it, eliminating any ideological preconception that is instead noted in certain reports and interventions. This is therefore a clarification due to our entrepreneurs, who, in designing their investment plans for the development of their activities, must understand whether or not the conditions exist for our territory, given that already from the start they have to face numerous and objective competitive disadvantages. On the latter, we reiterated the urgency to complete the reforms and implement the desired strategic plan for the country. While, with regard to economic development, we can only detect ambiguous positions, as also emerged in the debate in recent days in the Great and General Council on the updating and integration of the PRG conceived by Boeri. It is a fundamental urban planning tool for companies investing in San Marino, because it will have to dare to respond to many problems that have been dragging on for some time in terms of traffic and mobility, strategic infrastructures and services. These issues should be the basis of the project under discussion, but there is no trace of them except, in a very negative and worrying sense, in official statements that even fear relocations, as if it were easy to move industries, or worse still the cancellation of entire they are productive. Not to mention the expansion forecasts already present in the tools, which someone would like to completely reset. For this development we have asked the government to take a clear position in this sense, smoothing out more details of the individual souls that make it up or that are expressed by the opposition, which takes into account those needs of the country and is not reduced to political skirmishes. A position that also fills the word sustainability with content, which must not become a brake on development, but must combine the needs of businesses with a correct and far-sighted use of resources. Urban planning has unfortunately turned out to be wrong and such errors must not be repeated and cannot fall on the economic activities that have invested and have grown where they were allowed to do so, even before it was allowed to build houses close to the areas. In this sense, land consumption cannot be an insurmountable constraint, but must be managed in a balanced way, giving companies the opportunity to grow, and providing for protections and compensations that reduce the impact on the environment and society as much as possible. . Linked to this issue there is obviously the energy problem, with respect to which San Marino must set itself the goal of quickly recovering greater autonomy. In this sense, we have given our willingness to the Government to collaborate to identify public and private strategies, interventions and investments to achieve this objective which, given the current tensions on the markets, has also become a priority. Also in this case, it is a question of putting in place clear and far-sighted economic policies, which will allow us to have a stronger and more competitive system in the future.
Cs Anis