“The choice of the Regional Council and of the owner of the Productive Activities, Tiziana Magnacca, to increase the sum allocated to the public notice for the granting of loans to businesses with 4.8 million euros is positive and must therefore be welcomed. artisans who have suffered damage from the Covid epidemic – says the regional director of CNA Artigiani Entrepreneurs of Italy Abruzzo, Silvio Calice, according to whom the regional government “has taken note with a sense of realism of the great emergency that has arisen in our territory for the world of micro businesses: this is demonstrated by the over one thousand requests that can be financed in the regional offices, a number that certifies the great difficulty faced by the craft sector”.
“Now – he adds – other measures need to be included in the Region’s agenda which have been waiting for a solution for some time, and which with the positive and proactive contribution of business organizations like ours will finally have to come to fruition. I am thinking above all of law number 9 of 2021, which also through the role of consortiums could contribute to increasing the resources made available for access to credit by smaller companies”.
According to the CNA, therefore, it is a question of everyone working together and with a constructive spirit to overcome the emergency. An emergency demonstrated by the starkness of the figures, first of which the contraction in the number of artisan businesses: from 2018 to today almost 2,800 have been lost, the worst national result after the Marche region alone. A fall, explains Calice, “which calls into question multiple factors and elements, namely policies regarding access to credit, containment of energy costs, stimulus to internationalization and digitalisation, business transfer, professional training. Structural elements on which the Covid emergency fell like a cleaver.” In this sense, the note concludes, «we think it is useful to return to thinking about the use of the regional law on craftsmanship, approved many years ago, but in fact never applied: if there are critical issues we are ready to give our contribution to remove them, but it is inconceivable that it remains completely unapplied.”
