European recovery funds “are a historic opportunity that we can not afford to miss,” stressed Ramon Juan, commercial director of Companies CaixaBank in the Balearic Islands, yesterday during the panel discussion held in Diario de Ibiza under the title ‘Economic Prospects and Next Generation Funds’, which was attended by Joan Carrió, director of the Office of Planning and Coordination of Strategic Investment of the Balearic Government; José Antonio Roselló, vice president of the Confederation of Business Associations of the Balearic Islands (CAEB); Maria Àngels Marí, general secretary of the Petita i Mitjana Empresa d’Ibiza i Formentera (Pimeef), and Manuel Sendino, manager of the Hotel Business Federation of Ibiza and Formentera.
Joan Carrió himself began the talk by recalling “the historic opportunity that the Next Generation funds represent from a financial point of view, but also the fact they have driven a process of collective reflection that has resulted in many proposals and projects” whose common denominator is “their transformative nature”, which is the objective of the Balearic Govern: “We hope – he said – that they contribute to developing strategic investments” to “move towards a new economic and social model”. In the opinion of Carrió, the pandemic “has highlighted” the current Balearic economic model, ultra-dependent on tourism, and “has demonstrated the fragility of our economy”. Hence the Govern has proposed “a roadmap” of which it is expected that the main investments to be carried out with recovery plans should be limited to four areas: economic diversification, sustainability, digitization and social inclusion.
The director of the Government’s Strategic Investment Planning Office put the amount of Next Generation funds already pre-allocated to the Balearic Islands at 1.5 billion euros
Ibiza and Formentera’s businesses: digitize or die
The commercial director of CaixaBank Companies is committed, in this sense, to digitization: “It is extremely important. Without it, companies will not be able to compete. The one that does not will not survive”, he warned. Pimeef’s general secretary warned that a call like this will run into the problem of ignoring “the digital maturity” of Ibiza and Formentera’s businesses: “Often,” she said, “projects are launched without knowing where we come from, what the basis is. Roselló pointed to an Exceltur report indicating that the pandemic has left one part of the business community badly affected, while another part has not fared too badly at all, those that had already immersed themselves in digitalisation. The vice president of the CAEB is committed to projects that “improve the internal efficiency of companies”, so that “they are not left out of the market”.
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.