The European Commission has today adopted a package of measures to stimulate new and different ways of unlocking long-term financing and support Europe’s return to sustainable economic growth. Significant long-term investment will be needed under the Europe 2020 strategy and the 2030 climate and energy package, in infrastructure, new technologies and innovation, R&D and human capital. Investment needs for transport, energy and telecom infrastructure networks of EU importance alone are estimated at €1 trillion for the period up to 2020 as identified by the Connecting Europe Facility.
The economic and financial crisis has affected the ability of the financial sector to channel funds to the real economy, in particular to long-term investment. Europe has always relied heavily on banks financing the real economy (two-thirds of funding comes from banks, compared to one-third in the US). As banks are deleveraging, there is less funding available to all sectors of the economy – for example less than one-third of Dutch and Greek SMEs and only around half of Spanish and Italian SMEs got the full amount of credit they applied for in 2013.
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